December, eh? A time to look back and take stock of the past year. And now we’ve got AI we don’t even need to take our own stock – we can have The Machines do it for us! And so who of us under the age of 70 wouldn’t be delighted to read our auto-generated Spotify analysis of the music we’d listened to this year, eh?
Well, for starters I guess that would include anyone greeted with information like this:
Right away this tells us that Spotify pegs its information on what 20-year-olds are listening to: because the early 70s was ~50 years ago, not ~70 years ago.
It’s not devastating information, if I’m honest – in the last few years I’ve had a fascination with The Meters, and more latterly have been diving into a vertical-listening odyssey around the work of Robert Palmer – who I realised I knew nothing about but whose work punctuated the classic-rock background hum of my suburban Adelaidean life. Weird serendipity then showed that Palmer’s first album (Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley – 1976) was made in conjunction with The Meters. And it’s mid-1970s so Spotify can piss off…
Still: Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin still get a healthy rotation on my Spotify (along with the excellent latter solo/band work of Robert Plant), so it should be NO surprise that my favourite artist is…
Being told I’m in the top 2% of global Peppa fans is kinda meaningless information, because it tells me nothing about the population size, nor how many people (smarter than I) were able to figure out Spotify’s “exclude these tracks from my playback history” function.
Still – the next thing this retrospective is asking me is Which of these tracks was your most-played of 2025?
Crikey. It’s a bit obvious now I think of it – I tend to listen, when unencumbered by an audience, to podcasts using my AntennaPod app on the phone: which knits into the car’s generic Bluetooth Player.
So the only music I’m really listening to is either what I remember to put on whilst working in my garden office, or what we’re listening to on the way to/from nursery. Which means the winner’s probably Bing Bong Zoo.
Well, that’s something I suppose.
Still – it’d be interesting to see what my top songs were over the course of the entire year…
Oh.
There’s a couple of questions/talking points out of this.
Firstly – how in the hell is it possible that my listening age is 70, when my top 5 tracks are all Peppa Pig tunes? There again, I suppose that Peppa commenced improving the world with her porcine output in 2004 so depending on how the Spotify algorithm classifies it that potentially giver her a “listening age” of 40 in the current world.
I was quite excited about the potential for rebuttal in this topic (can’t call it a conversation, cos Spotify don’t give a shit…) in the form of the Last.FM stats which I’ve lovingly been gathering since around 2007… only, it transpires that a data breach in 2022 led to a password reset edict which I missed, so, not much being collected there of late.
IS the aggregated “listening age” driven by the age of the artist, or by some kind of graph of the humans listening to those artists? In which case, given children can’t hold Spotify accounts, the gerontocratic skew makes an amount of sense.
What this teaches me, in the end, is that regardless how much situational enthusiasm I may hold for Rizzle Kicks following an errant podcast mention: unless I’m on the top of my clicking-“Exclude from my profile”-button-game, then it’s the mighty catalogue of Peppa (and though we didn’t see a “full chart” from 2025) and I would expect Paw Patrol and Hey Duggee which will dominate my measured taste.
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of The Wheels On The Bus. Will she ever get sick of it? Not so far…
