The Geographic Flow Of Music On Spotify

Abstract

As Daniel J. Levitin interestingly noted, No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music. Therefore, the impetus behind this research paper is to model the interactions between countries in order to reveal music listening trends at a macro level. Subsequently, the framework for performing this analysis consists of techniques used in the multidisciplinary field known as Network Science. Throughout the past decade, the world has witnessed a gradual shift in the way music is listened to. In that respect, Spotify, an online music streaming service, has been the imperative giant with a user base of around 191 million. With the help of Spotify’s Application Programming Interface (API), a dataset was compiled, which contains the Weekly Top 40 streamed songs across 50 countries, in the year 2017. Through research, the team explored whether, and to which extent, do language, nationality and geographic distance influence the way global communities are formed. Furthermore, the project aimed to prove that there is a clear direction of leadership flow in the network. Until now, the acquired information supports the hypotheses that some countries do indeed follow the trends beset by others and that language and nationality play an essential role in the development of communities.