Streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music dominate the music industry. Their extensive catalogs now cover the entire spectrum of consumable music. Relying on artificial intelligence, these services introduce users to new songs they'll probably like, as predicted by the services' algorithms. Traditional physical music media no longer stand a chance against this and gather dust on the shelves. Of course, this development also means that anonymous music consumption is a thing of the past, because streaming services keep precise records of who played what track, when, and for how long.

On request, Spotify will even hand over the acquired data (Figure 1). If you poke around a bit on their website, you'll find the buttons you need to press to request a copy of these files in Account | Privacy Settings, but Spotify takes their sweet time to respond. From the time of the request, it takes about a week for their archivist to retrieve the data from the files in the Spotify basement, compress them, and post them as a ZIP archive on the website for you to pick up. After receiving Spotify's email notification, you can then download the data for two weeks and poke around in it locally to your heart's content.

Exercise

The ZIP file containing the downloaded data includes a JSON file named StreamingHistory0.json with the metadata of all the streams you played in historical order (Figure 2). In addition to the song and artist, the entries also list the start date and time and the playback duration. Playback duration is particularly interesting because if the user interrupts a stream after a few seconds and fast forwards to the next song, the track probably made it onto the playlist by mistake and was something the user didn't actually like. It will most likely turn out to be a false positive when it comes to putting together music suggestions.

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