Between the 100 artists received for each of this terms I created a set, so as not to get duplicates, and then if a new artist is not in this set, I’d consider it a ‘discovery’. Basically, you can only access the first 100 for each term. There’s an offset parameter to balance with the limit so as to advance further in the list, but if you go further than 50 in the offset it returns an exception. This gets you up to 50 artists per request and an interesting parameter of it lets you choose between long_term (calculated from several years of data and including all new data as it becomes available), medium_term (approximately last 6 months), and short_term (approximately last 4 weeks). How do we measure discovered artists? I used what I had in hand and decided to use the Spotify API’s function to get an user’s top artists. Now, this is the grey part where it starts to get not-so-scientificly-rigorous. Indeed, the first track that I listened to was Life Wasted ( AWESOME SONG TO START 2019, RIGHT?!). Mine, in particular, seemed odd like if my last months were not included at all. Just a quick look in r/spotify in Reddit is enough to realize most of the top 5 artists or top 5 songs were strange. Spotify Wrapped got leaked a couple of days before December and not every user was happy with the insights provided. Though not everything was as sweet this iteration. They are supposed to make you start the year listening to something new tailored to your liking by Spotify’s amazing recommendation algorithms. I need to confess, I’m in love with Tastebreakers ❤. This year brought Spotify Wrapped which tells you lots of stats (which we’ll be analyzing) and two playlists: Top 100 and Tastebreakers.

2017 also brought the amount of minutes, the top songs playlist and a cool other playlist called “The ones that got away” featuring, maybe, cool recommendations from the past year.

The amount of minutes spent listening to music, the number of different songs and a pretty cool insight about which was your favorite day of the week to listen to music. 2016 came with the usual top 5 of songs, artists and genres.

Spotify top artists 2016