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This is awesome. You kinda touch on this, but the main thing that jumps out at me is that there seems to be a very strong bias towards songs from the late 90s and early 00s. Do you think this is because Spotify’s main cohort is people in their late 20s to early 30s, who came of age, musically, during that time?

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Honestly, I expect recency to be a large factor in Spotify plays. That is, we expect that the average hit from the 70s to have fewer plays than a hit from the 80s, and so on.

Regardless of the age of the listener, I expect newly released songs to have higher playcounts (in fact, I plotted this curve, but it was too high-brow for the Internet and the audience for which I was writing).

That said, if I managed to cut the data by age-bucket, I do think that the results would shift toward the music with which you grew up.

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