Songs Du Jour is the playlist I keep downloaded on my phone and contains all the songs I’m into at the moment. These songs are pulled from my Spotify Discover playlist a vast majority of the time. When I am bored of a song or find myself skipping it, I take it off the list.
From March 1, 2017 to March 1, 2018, I tracked every song on my Songs Du Jour playlist on a spreadsheet to visualize the life cycle of my listening.
I wasn't sure what it was going to look like when I started, but as the spreadsheet grew, the project took shape. I wanted to pack as much relevant information as I possibly could into the graphic while still maintaining a clean design that told a story at a glance.
Part of my original spreadsheet
Process/Conclusions:
One of the reasons I started this project was to do a project that involved a large set of raw data. I started by asking myself a bunch of questions, ranging from "how many songs do I keep on the playlist in a year?" to "how often do I add songs du jour songs to another playlist?" (a lot of my listening is playlist-based). As the project went on I found new questions emerging, like "what was Spotify's most successful Discover playlist?" or "do I still add songs when I'm traveling or visiting my family?". At the start I only recorded what I saw as the essentials: title, artist, date added to SdJ, date removed from SdJ, and genre. I keep all the songs that were formerly on SdJ on a separate playlist, so I was able to go back and retroactively add data to new columns (added to another playlist, where I found the song, was it a cover, etc).
I answered these questions (245, about 25% of the time, 4/3/17, not as often), but even cooler was discovering stuff about my own listening habits by creating and then looking at the visualization. These included the cycle of genres (I never realized I had such distinct punk phases, for example!), the more even genre mix that occurs when my playlist turnover appears to be higher, and the simultaneous rarity of pop music and the longevity of those few pop songs.
