Spotify Streaming History Analyzer

Getting your data out of Spotify

Spotify doesn't hand this over from the app. Open spotify.com in a browser, sign in, go to your Account page and find Privacy settings (Spotify has also called it Account privacy). Scroll to Download your data. There are a few boxes there, and the one you want is Extended streaming history. Tick it, press the request button, and confirm with the link they email you.

Then you wait. Spotify says up to 30 days for the extended history. In practice it's often a week or less, but don't count on it. When it's ready you get a second email with a download link for a file called my_spotify_data.zip. Drop that zip on the box above as it is. You don't need to unzip it, and you don't need to pick files out of it. The tool goes through it, takes the streaming history files and ignores the rest (playlists, search queries, your profile data).

The link in that email expires after a couple of weeks, so download the zip soon after it arrives. If you miss it you have to request the whole thing again.

Extended history or account data?

Spotify offers two versions and the names don't help. Account data is the quick one. It arrives in a few days and holds roughly the last year of plays in files called StreamingHistory_music_0.json (older downloads used StreamingHistory0.json). Each play has the end time, artist, track and how long it played. That's it.

Extended streaming history is the good one. It goes back to the day you made the account, and every play carries a lot more: the album, whether you hit skip, whether shuffle was on, which device and country, and why the track started and ended. Those files are named Streaming_History_Audio_2019-2021_0.json and so on, with one or more per year. Very old downloads called them endsong_0.json. All of these work here.

If you happen to drop both versions together, the analyzer uses only the extended files. The short history is just the last year of the long one, and counting both would double those twelve months.

What the analyzer shows

If you'd rather open the lists as a real .xlsx with the columns already set up, run any of the CSV files through the CSV to Excel converter.

Up top you get total listening time in hours, plays over 30 seconds, how many different tracks and artists you played, skips, the number of days you listened to anything, podcast and audiobook time (kept apart so a three-hour true crime episode doesn't push your music numbers around) and the date range of your files.

Below that are the top lists: artists, tracks and albums, top 100 each. You can rank by minutes or by plays, and they tell different stories. Ranking by plays rewards short songs you loop. Ranking by minutes rewards long albums you put on while working. Each row also shows the first time that song or artist appears anywhere in your history, which is a nice way to see when you actually found a band you now think you've always liked.

Then there's minutes per month across your whole history, a heatmap of hours against weekdays, a table of the songs you skip the most, and the very first track in your data. The date filter at the top changes everything at once. Pick a year from the list or set your own from and to dates and all the numbers, charts and lists update. Want your own Wrapped for 2019, or for the summer you moved cities? That's two clicks.

Four CSV buttons give you the full artist, track and album lists (not just the top 100) and every single play in the selected period.

How the numbers are counted

A play counts once you listened for at least 30 seconds. That's the same line Spotify uses for streams and royalties, so the counts should feel familiar. Anything shorter still adds to listening time and still counts as a started song, but it isn't a play.

Skips work differently depending on the file. The extended history has a skipped flag and records when a track ended because you pressed next, and either one counts as a skip. The short account data history has nothing like that, so there a play under 30 seconds is treated as a skip. It's a decent guess, not a perfect one. A song you stopped at 20 seconds because your bus arrived will show up as a skip.

Times in Spotify's files are in UTC. The analyzer converts them to the time zone your computer is set to, so the heatmap shows your evenings as evenings. If you've lived in a different time zone for part of your history, those years will be shifted by the difference.

Spotify sometimes repeats the same play in two files when an export spans a year boundary. Exact duplicates (same time, same track, same length) are removed and the count is shown so you know it happened.

Things people find in there

The first track in the history is usually the most fun. It's often something from the week you signed up that you'd completely forgotten. The second most common reaction is to the monthly chart, where you can see exactly when a new job started (the morning commute shows up as a block in the heatmap) or when a baby arrived (the 3 a.m. column lights up).

The skip table is quietly useful too. If a song sits in one of your playlists and you've skipped it 40 times out of 45, it's probably time to take it out. And if you're settling an argument about who in the house actually plays that one album nonstop, everyone can request their own data and compare minutes.

Some people use the plays CSV for more serious things: checking listening during a free trial period, building a personal music database, or feeding the data into a spreadsheet to make charts the tool doesn't have.

Privacy, and why there's no login

Spotify isn't the only company sitting on years of your history. The Google Maps Timeline viewer opens your location export the same way, inside the browser with nothing uploaded.

Plenty of Spotify stats sites ask you to connect your account. That gives them access to your profile and only gets them your recent top items, because that's all the Spotify API shares. Your data download has far more, and it doesn't need anyone to log in to anything.

Everything here runs in JavaScript inside your browser tab. The zip is opened on your computer, the numbers are worked out on your computer, and nothing is sent to this site or anywhere else. Your history includes IP addresses and the countries you streamed from, so that matters more than it sounds. If you want proof, load the page, turn off Wi-Fi and run it. It works the same.

When something looks off

If the tool says it found no plays, check the file names. Userdata.json, Playlist1.json and SearchQueries.json come in the same zip but aren't listening history. If your numbers look small, you probably have the account data version, which only covers a year. Request the extended history and you'll get everything.

Huge histories are fine. Ten years of daily listening is a few hundred thousand plays, and that loads in a few seconds on a normal laptop. Phones can do it too, they're just slower with big zips.