Perhaps artist fandom is cutting through, but in the grand scheme of things, among the thousands of songs we listen to it is not reflected in actual consumption as much as one might expect.

Most people felt their top artists made sense and, in fact, tended to be similar year after year (even if top songs varied and were not necessarily connected to top artists). Streams do not equal fans - and vice versa 2022 saw growth moderate, but the long-term outlook is not only strong. The pandemic triggered a surge in the music creator economy, which brought with it an influx of external interest and investment. In other words, the difference between the songs in my top five and top 100 could be just a handful of plays. The result is that our “top” songs are a bit arbitrary. It seems we are giving many songs a similar number of plays each, rather than playing a couple of favourite songs much more than others. I love Mitski, but was surprised to see ‘Bug Like An Angel’ as my top song - and even more surprised to see it had only 29 plays. This may be why the broad sentiment from MIDiA staff and friends alike is that our top songs feel…a bit random. While more artists are getting exposure to audiences, it is increasingly hard to find repeat listeners as users spread their listening across a wider range of both songs and artists than ever. This translates to an average of fewer than two songs per artist. For reference, our top streamer listened to over 6,000 different artists in 2023, and over 11,000 songs! We listened to an average of 2,001 artists and 3,272 songs each. Today’s listeners also seem to orient their listening around songs more than artists - while listening to more of both than ever before. Still, as culture fragments, there are surely more sub-genres today than existed in the past and today’s listeners are less likely to be genre-dependent at all. Regardless of how long these sub-genres have existed, we did not begin classifying them and measuring their consumption until relatively recently in music history.

Spotify classifies music into hundreds of sub-genres. Of course, part of what has changed is the categorisation itself. We listened to an average of 55 genres each (with a high of 174!), reflecting what we already know: listeners are increasingly genre-fluid. With that said, let’s break down what we found. To be clear, this was a light (and semi-fun) exercise designed to illustrate what Wrapped can say about listening habits, not a formal evidence base. Of course, the major caveat is that we are looking at the listening behaviours of entertainment company employees, including music analysts - far from the average Spotify user. No wonder artists struggle to break through the noise and find repeat listeners when we stream an average of 3,272 different songs per year! However, the data also revealed some surprises and paradoxes. The results laid bare many of the trends we have been studying. We collected Wrapped data from 10 MIDiA members who use Spotify to find the average number of genres, artists, and songs we listened to on Spotify in 2023. Love it or loathe it, Wrapped has proven irresistible and the MIDiA team is far from immune. It would not be the holidays without Spotify Wrapped, the ubiquitous marketing scheme that involves Spotify repackaging the vast amount of data it collects about users into fun personalised insights ready for social media.

Spotify listening stats by artist