Chapter 04
The Seasonal Me
The type of music one listens to doesn't distribute evenly across the year.
Season totals
The hypothesis
Everyone assumes they know their seasonal listening pattern. Summer is upbeat. Winter is introspective. Autumn is a return-to-the-catalog and exploration of deep cuts. Spring is discovery. The hypothesis writes itself. The data doesn't agree.
Winter
80,089
plays
Spring
78,681
plays
Summer
70,724
plays
Autumn
76,456
plays
Winter leads. Summer trails at 70,724. We build these neat little mythologies about how our listening shifts with the weather, but it isn't always like that...
Season heatmap by year
Whether the pattern holds or shifts year to year, intensity by local season in each cell, lives in this grid. Hover a cell for the exact play count. Columns follow the hemisphere toggle above.
The days
Monday through Sunday across 17 years, the spread is almost perfectly flat. Monday 46,260, Saturday 39,654. No clear peak day, no listening weekends, no saved-for-leisure pattern. Music runs at roughly the same volume through every day of the week.
By month
The two biggest months across all 17 years are January and November. Not December, not summer. November coincides with arrivals: Japan in November 2019, Germany in November 2021.
The city clocks
Each city produced a different listening rhythm. Intensity runs cool blue (quiet hours toward grey); the busiest hour and its count sit beside each clock. Hover any wedge and it turns white while a tooltip shows that hour block and play count.
Listening clock
South Africa
Busiest hour
8:00PM
Plays in busiest hour
276
Listening clock
Mozambique
Busiest hour
7:00AM
Plays in busiest hour
7,298
Listening clock
Japan
Busiest hour
1:00PM
Plays in busiest hour
6,471
Listening clock
Germany
Busiest hour
4:00PM
Plays in busiest hour
5,464
Each city produced a different relationship with when listening happens.