Contents
Musical eras
Ten distinct eras, found by comparing every month's artist mix with the six months before it and then reading the results like a diary. Each card shows who defined the era, what you played most, and what changed at the border.
A musical autobiography, 2014 to today
Told entirely through listening behaviour: where you were, what you looped, what you skipped, and when the lights went out.
The first thing you ever pressed play on was Paradise by Coldplay, on a Windows 7 laptop, at 6.27 in the evening, and you skipped it after four seconds. The first song you let finish, five minutes later, was P!nk's Just Give Me a Reason. Then you left for three months. 2013 is 140 listens and a 64% skip rate: a person poking at a new toy, not yet trusting it.
In January the connection country flips from SG to GB and stays there for eleven years. The first thing you do in the new country is research wedding music: Canon in D, Butterfly Waltz, Fireflies, most of it skipped within seconds, as if auditioning. Then, on 11 June, Ed Sheeran arrives, and June 2014 becomes the most crowded month of your life on Spotify: 786 artists in the year, 95% of them new to you. All of Me 34 times, Mr. Brightside 33, Summer 27, A Sky Full of Stars 25. On 19 June you played 116 songs in one day. The last weekend of August you listened to nothing but James Blunt's Moon Landing, 57 plays, and then never returned to him. 2014 is the sound of British radio being learned from scratch, and learned fast.
On 19 January you found Firestone and played it 24 times before the day was out; it ended the year on 42, your most-repeated song of 2015. Then something changed in March: on the 5th you sat down with the Grand Budapest Hotel score and played 42 Desplat cues in a month, and on the 23rd you played 127 tracks in a day with Nils Frahm on top. The Lord of the Rings scores arrived the same week. Howard Shore's 233 minutes made him your artist of the year with only 14 plays, which tells you how long those pieces are. This is the year the piano and the film score moved in, alongside the tropical house.
Volume collapsed: 152 hours in 2015, 45 in 2016, 45 in 2017. Shuffle went from 2% to 47%. What survived the cut was telling. Ghibli piano arrangements by Relax α Wave were the most-played thing of 2016; Yann Tiersen's Comptine d'un autre été kept returning; in 2017 Chilly Gonzales's Chambers became a whole-album weekend habit. There were small, complete detours: a Disney afternoon in August 2016, RIDSA's Je m'en fous 13 times on 16 May 2016, and on 9 December 2017 a 97-play day that was almost entirely Aussie Christmas with Bucko & Champs. Stranger Things and Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks fill the gaps. Fewer plays, but the ones that remain are the ones you chose.
The year of the sudden door. On 18 May you discovered tricolor, ko-ko-ya and Joe Hisaishi in one sitting and Japanese instrumental music became a place you go. On 14 June Ramin Djawadi's Game of Thrones score got 32 plays in a week and then nothing. On 13 September, Isabelle Pierre's 1971 album, 30 plays in a fortnight. On 17 December, Le temps est bon by Bon Entendeur, 21 times in a morning. And in the last week of November, at two in the morning, 32 plays of Oh Wonder in a single session; 94% of every Oh Wonder play you have ever made happened after midnight. On 5 December Christine and the Queens appeared for the first time. Every one of these would matter later.
2CELLOS entered on 30 July and by the end of the year had 195 plays and 753 minutes, more than any music artist in any other single year of your history. The 30-day window starting 2 September 2019 holds 171 of them. Before that, from 27 January, Mercy by Madame Monsieur opened a Eurovision chapter that peaked in May (Duncan Laurence, Måns Zelmerlöw, Conchita, Loreen) and again on 4 December, your biggest music day ever: 9.1 hours, 161 plays, Måns and Madame Monsieur on top. Calvin Harris came back after four years away. Jack Savoretti burned bright for exactly a year.
2020 is your quietest year since 2017 and the most diverse of your life by artist entropy: ambient piano shuffles, Adele, the Mandalorian, Bach, Tchaikovsky. Nothing repeated. Then 2021 did the opposite. Repeat rate hit 53%, the highest ever. Tilted 56 times on 25 October, 70 in the week, 75 in the year. July 41 times in the week of 29 April, never once skipped. Believe It or Not, the Greatest American Hero theme, 31 times on 30 November and once the next day and never again. Mercy, both versions, 64 more plays. Joe Hisaishi at his peak. Whatever 2021 was, you got through it by putting one song on and leaving it there.
Ed Sheeran returned in March 2022 with a force he never had even in 2014: 170 plays, the whole of "=", Bad Habits 45 times. Pascal Letoublon's Friendships, 22 in an evening in November. Queen, ABBA, Elton, Tina Turner, Journey: a classic-hits streak that nobody in 2016 would have predicted. 2023 kept the momentum with Imagine Dragons, Coldplay, Blinding Lights and Firework, then swerved in November into Françoise Hardy and Zaz, the start of a French-chanson thread that runs to today. Skip rate crept up to 19%: more listening on shuffle, more impatience. On 4 May 2023 you played 149 songs, mostly Ed.
Music shrank to 26 hours in 2024, the least since 2013. What replaced it started on 18 May 2024: Soothing Oasis, 496 plays, "Rest" 63 times, all overnight. Music became a daytime garnish: Kate Rusby's Three Little Birds for a week in June, Miley's Flowers, Pete Tong's orchestral 9pm (Till I Come), Lana Del Rey after three years away, and, in December 2024, a 90s dance night (Culture Beat, Real McCoy, Robert Miles, Darude). Early 2025 was Calmly (325 plays in six weeks), then in August 2025 the taste came back awake: Hans Zimmer's Now We Are Free, 121 plays on 29 August, Stacey Kent, Keren Ann, Jill Barber, the French jazz singers.
September 2025 is the first Danish listening. October brings Golden from KPop Demon Hunters, 59 plays, your discovery of the year. November: I Like Life 21 times in one evening, and a Ghibli lullaby album 369 times in one night. Then on 27 February 2026 Miracle Tones arrives and never leaves: 10,217 plays, 453 hours, every 432 Hz track played almost exactly 325 times, which is what an album on repeat every night looks like. By May 2026 the connection country is DK. Underneath the sleep tones, the daytime music is the most eclectic it has been since 2014: 大葉奏子's Ghibli piano album, Titanium, Levels, TWO LANES, The xx's Intro 36 times, a CYRIL remix of Disturbed on a Danish summer afternoon, and on 25 August 2026, 86 plays of one Japanese piano record in a single evening. You are 13 years in and still doing the thing you did on day one: finding one thing you love and playing it until it becomes furniture.
Turning points
For every month with enough music, we measured how similar its artist mix was to the previous six months. The chart is that similarity over time (1 = identical, 0 = nothing in common). The table lists the sharpest breaks and who walked in and out of the door.
Previously on Shannen…
A recap for every year, generated from what you actually played. Pick a year.
Obsessed, then abandoned
Artists you played hard and then dropped without a backward glance. Intensity is the share of all their plays that fell inside your single most intense 90-day window; abruptness is how much of the affair was still burning in its final 60 days. Ranked by a combined score, music only, artists with at least 25 plays and more than a year of silence.
James Blunt, August 2014
58 of your 59 James Blunt plays happened inside one 90-day window, and 57 of them inside one week starting 31 August 2014, almost all of Moon Landing. One play of You're Beautiful in December 2015 and then nothing for nearly eleven years. It is the longest silence after the shortest, hottest relationship in your entire history.
Joey Scarbury, 30 November 2021
Believe It or Not, the theme from The Greatest American Hero, 31 times on a Tuesday morning, once more on Wednesday, never again. Never skipped either. Whatever needed that song got it in full.
Isabelle Pierre, September 2018
A whole 1971 French album, 30 plays in a fortnight, 21 distinct tracks, and then the door shut for good. Three months later you were playing the Bon Entendeur remix of her Le temps est bon 21 times in a morning, which suggests the original was research.
2CELLOS, 2019 to 2023
319 plays, your biggest instrumental relationship, 61% of it in one 90-day stretch of autumn 2019. It did not end abruptly; it ended with We Found Love on 9 February 2023 and 3.6 years of silence since, which is why they lead the exes table below rather than this one.
Musical exes
Artists you once played constantly and have not touched in at least two years. Relationship length runs from first play to last; peak month is the month you were most in love; last listen is exactly what it says.
Adele deserves a footnote: eleven years together, first played the day after you joined, and the last thing you played was Hello, in July 2023, which is either a coincidence or the best exit line in the dataset.
Second lives
Songs that vanished for at least two years and then came back with real force. Ranked by the length of the silence and the size of the return.
Songs you have loved for ten years
Every track with at least a decade between its first and last play and at least five plays in total. "Enduring" means it turned up in six or more different years; "nostalgia" means it disappeared and came back for the occasional visit.
Enduring favourites
Nostalgia plays
On Top Of The World is the truest constant you have: eleven separate years between May 2013 and October 2025, never more than 16 plays in any of them, never gone for more than a year. All of Me is the bigger number but front-loaded (34 of its 58 plays are from 2014). Comptine d'un autre été is the one that follows you between eras: the piano years, the French years, the Ghibli years and 2026 all contain it.
What 2014-you loved and 2026-you has forgotten
Your top artists and tracks of 2014 that have had no plays at all in the last three years (since September 2023).
Forgotten artists
Forgotten tracks
How adventurous were you each year?
Three proxies, music only: the share of the year's artists you had never played before (discovery), how evenly your plays were spread across artists (diversity, as normalised entropy), and how often you repeated a track you had already played that year (repetition). The score weights them 40/40/20.
2014 is the obvious outlier, because everything was new. Strip that out and the most adventurous real years are 2016 and 2018 (high discovery, high diversity, low repetition: you were sampling) and 2020 (the highest diversity of any year, nothing on repeat). The least adventurous year is 2021, when half of every play was a repeat of something you had already played that year and only 49% of artists were new. 2026 looks adventurous on discovery (1,147 artists, 63% new) but it is inflated by ambient producers surfacing on shuffle; its repetition rate of 51% is the honest number.
When did you become who you are now?
Each historical year compared with your latest twelve months (1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026) using cosine similarity on minutes per artist. Two lines: music only, and everything including sleep audio.
Music only, the year most like today is 2025 (0.38), then 2023 (0.22), then, surprisingly, 2014 (0.16), ahead of every year in between. The Hans Zimmer, Coldplay, French jazz and dance revival of 2025 flows straight into 2026; 2023's Imagine Dragons, Coldplay and Françoise Hardy still echo; and 2014's Calvin Harris, Guetta, Avicii and Swedish House Mafia have quietly come back. The years least like now are 2019 (0.04, the 2CELLOS and Eurovision year) and 2017 (0.06). Include the sleep audio and no past year resembles today at all: the best is 2025 at 0.04, because Miracle Tones did not exist in your life before 27 February 2026 and now accounts for most of it.
Bridge artists
Artists with at least four plays in three or more of the ten eras. These are the ones that carried you across the borders. Era numbers refer to section 01.
Ed Sheeran
Present in nine of ten eras, absent only from 2013. The bridge from radio 2014 to the piano years (Photograph and Thinking Out Loud kept a pulse going in 2016 and 2017), then the engine of the 2022 comeback.
Chilly Gonzales
Six eras from 2015 to 2026. He is how the tropical-house year became the piano years, and he is the weekend constant underneath everything since (72% of his plays are Saturdays and Sundays).
Joe Hisaishi
Only four eras, but strategic ones: he is the link between the 2016 Ghibli piano arrangements, the 2018 Japanese instrumental door, the 2021 loops and the 2026 大葉奏子 binge. Every Ghibli chapter passes through him.
Yann Tiersen
Six consecutive eras from 2013 to 2019, then gone until 2026. Amélie is the bridge from Singapore classical to the French thread that later became Madame Monsieur and the chanson singers.
Calvin Harris and David Guetta
Both in six eras including 2013 and 2026: the dance-pop spine that disappears for the piano years and reappears whenever you want to feel like it is 2014 again.
Madame Monsieur and Stacey Kent
Four eras each, and together they are the French bridge: Madame Monsieur carries 2019 into 2021 and 2023, Stacey Kent carries the 2014 jazz voice into the 2021 chanson cluster and on to 2026.
The family tree
Clusters of artists and the order in which they appeared, with first-play dates from the export. Read each branch top to bottom: the artist above is the one that seems to have led you to the one below.
How the branches feed each other
The Singapore classical seed (Bach, Debussy, Mozart in August 2013) grew into Yann Tiersen within a fortnight, and Tiersen is the root of two branches: the neo-classical piano line (Frahm, Arnalds, Richter in mid 2014, then Einaudi, Gonzales, Beving and O'Halloran in a single week of March 2015) and the French line (Cœur de Pirate in March 2015, Françoise Hardy that December).
The film-score branch started with Hans Zimmer in 2013 but only became a habit when the Grand Budapest Hotel and Lord of the Rings arrived in the same week of March 2015 as the piano composers. Scores and piano have moved together ever since; the Ghibli branch is where they meet.
Where the 2026 sound comes from
The dance revival of 2026 is not new taste; it is the 2013 Singapore seed (Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, Avicii, Guetta) re-flowering through the 2014 Robin Schulz remixes, the 2015 Kygo winter, the 2019 Aly & Fila chill-out mixes and the 2022 Pascal Letoublon loop, into TWO LANES, Ben Böhmer, Alex Cruz and the CYRIL remixes. The Ghibli branch reaches 大葉奏子 through six earlier stops. The French jazz cluster of 2021 grows out of Norah Jones and Stacey Kent in 2014. Almost nothing in your current listening lacks a ten-year-old ancestor.
Early discoveries
Artists you played before they broke, judged by your first-play date against when they reached wide popularity. The dates are yours; the breakout dates are public record.
| Artist | Your first play | What you played | When they broke | Lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Juliette Armanet | 3 Dec 2017 | Petite Amie era | Le Dernier Jour du Disco went wide in France in 2022, and she sang at the Paris 2024 Olympics opening | 4 years |
| Lewis Capaldi | 14 Jun 2018 | Early singles | Someone You Loved was not released until November 2018 and hit number one in March 2019 | 9 months |
| Dua Lipa | 14 May 2016 | Be the One | New Rules, August 2017 | 15 months |
| Tom Walker | 29 Nov 2016 | Just You and I (acoustic) | Leave a Light On, late 2017 into 2018 | 12 months |
| Kygo | 19 Jan 2015 | Firestone, 24 times that day | Firestone charted in the UK in spring 2015; Kygo's global breakout was that summer | 3 to 6 months |
| Jack Savoretti | 27 Feb 2019 | Candlelight | Singing to Strangers, his first UK number one album, was released 8 March 2019 | 9 days |
| Zara Larsson | 8 Dec 2015 | Lush Life | UK top ten in summer 2016 | 6 months |
| Years & Years | 19 Jan 2015 | King | King went to number one in March 2015 | 6 weeks |
| James Bay | 24 Feb 2015 | Spotify Session cover | Chaos and the Calm, March 2015 | 4 weeks |
| Angèle | 5 Dec 2018 | Flou | Big in Belgium and France from Brol (Oct 2018); Bruxelles je t'aime and the Dua Lipa feature took her wider in 2021 | Early outside France |
| Nils Frahm | 26 Jun 2014 | Ambre | All Melody (2018) is when he stopped being a niche name | Years |
| Chilly Gonzales | 25 Mar 2015 | Chambers (released that month) | Never mainstream, but the Chambers press cycle was the moment | On release |
| Noah Cyrus | 15 Jan 2019 | Pre-July singles | July was released that summer and went viral in 2020; your 43-play week was April 2021 | Early to her, late to the song |
| Oh Wonder | 29 Nov 2015 | Debut album | Ultralife, 2017 | Early adopter |
| Pascal Letoublon | 16 Nov 2022 | Friendships | Went viral in 2020 and 2021 | Late by a year |
| HUNTR/X | 4 Oct 2025 | Golden | KPop Demon Hunters was released in June 2025; Golden topped charts in August | Late by 2 months, then 59 plays |
Honourable mention: The xx. Your tenth-ever Spotify play, on 10 May 2013 in Singapore, was Intro, and thirteen years later it was your second most-played song of the last twelve months. That is not early discovery; that is a very long fuse.
The most statistically unusual thing about you
It is not the French chanson or the Eurovision or the Aussie Christmas album. It is this.
One artist you had never heard of before 27 February 2026 is now 26% of every listen you have ever made. Its 143 tracks have play counts between 320 and 328, a spread so flat that it can only be the same album on repeat, start to finish, night after night, for 109 nights, including one unbroken run of 18. In May 2026 it was 83.5% of your listening market. Since 2024 you have spent 817 hours on functional audio against 1,099 hours on music across the whole thirteen years, which means that in under two and a half years the sleep habit has almost caught up with a lifetime of taste. The concentration index of your artist plays (a Gini coefficient of 0.76) is closer to a national income distribution than to a music library.
The second most unusual thing is the shape of a Shannen obsession. Most people's top songs accumulate; yours detonate. Tilted, 56 plays in a day. Believe It or Not, 31 in a day. Firestone, Mercy, Friendships, July, Le temps est bon, I Like Life: all between 21 and 24 plays in a single day, then a sharp decline. Your top 1% of listening days hold a wildly disproportionate share of your top songs' plays. Wrapped tells you what you loved; it never tells you that you loved it all at once.
Binges
Your most extreme artist, album and song obsessions inside 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, shown twice: for music only and for everything including the sleep audio.
Music only
Everything, sleep audio included
Top single-day song binges
Top seven-day song binges
Skips
A skip here is any play under 30 seconds. Music only. "Nearly always skip" needs at least 8 plays; "almost never skip" needs at least 20.
Songs you nearly always skip
Songs you almost never skip
The 109 skips
You have started Calvin Harris's I Need Your Love 110 times and finished it once. It is almost certainly the track Spotify queued after Summer on autoplay, which makes it the most-rejected song in your life without you ever choosing it. It is included here as a public service.
The zero-skip club
July (44 plays, 0 skips), Intro by The xx (36, 0), Poetic Silence (26, 0), Believe It or Not (33, 1), Le temps est bon (25, 1). Notice what they have in common: every one is a song you binged. When you commit, you commit to the end.
Artists you skip most (25+ plays)
Artists you never skip
After midnight
Which artists you are disproportionately likely to play between midnight and 5am, local time. Lift is the artist's after-midnight share divided by your overall after-midnight share (6.6% for music, 31.5% for everything).
Music: most nocturnal
Music: strictly daytime
Oh Wonder is the clear winner at 14 times your baseline: 94% of their plays happened after midnight, most of them in one session on 25 November 2018. Kaiser Hulenstadt and Hello Artemisia! are the modern-ambient equivalent. The next tier is telling: Michael Bublé, Melody Gardot, Frank Sinatra, Norah Jones, Jason Mraz. After midnight you want crooners. Meanwhile Yann Tiersen, 大葉奏子, tricolor, Zaz and Taylor Swift have never once been played after midnight in thirteen years.
Weekday you, weekend you
Music only, by local day of the week.
Weekend artists (highest weekend share, 25+ plays)
Weekday artists (lowest weekend share)
Weekday-you listens more and skips more: 0.98 hours per listening day against 0.75, a 14% skip rate against 13%, and less shuffle. Weekday-you is 2CELLOS, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, Christine and the Queens, Howard Shore: the big, familiar, propulsive things you put on while doing something else. Weekend-you is Chilly Gonzales (72% of his plays), James Blunt, Oh Wonder, Juliette Armanet, Queen, Bach and Françoise Hardy, and shuffles more: slower, more deliberate, more French, more piano. Weekend-you is the one who reads the sleeve notes.
Morning, afternoon, evening, late night
Four versions of your taste by local time: late night (midnight to 6am), morning (6am to noon), afternoon (noon to 6pm) and evening (6pm to midnight). Music only. Each card shows the artists with the highest share of their plays in that window, and what you actually played most.
Morning-you is the most French: Madame Monsieur, Noah Cyrus, Yann Tiersen, Cœur de Pirate, Françoise Hardy, THE ROOP. Mercy has been played 52 times before noon. Afternoon-you is the pop and stadium version: Ed Sheeran, 2CELLOS, Calvin Harris, Christine and the Queens, Queen, Elton, Dua Lipa; afternoon tracks are the longest you play (3.5 minutes on average). Evening-you is the only one who plays the French jazz singers, the Japanese piano and, weirdly, all of James Blunt and all of Colin Buchanan: 100% of both artists' plays are after 6pm. Late-night-you is Oh Wonder and ambient piano, skips almost nothing (5%) and plays the shortest tracks.
Groundhog days
Days at least a year apart whose listening was remarkably similar (cosine similarity of the day's artist mix of 0.7 or more, at least eight music plays each). Near-duplicate pairs from the same obsession are collapsed.
The Christmas that repeated
9 December 2017 and 25 December 2023, six years apart, share Colin Buchanan, Darlene Love, Ariana Grande, John Lennon and Wham!. The first was the day you discovered Aussie Christmas with Bucko & Champs (55 plays); the second was Christmas Day with the same album, which means it survived six years as a tradition despite no plays at all in between.
The cello days
Nearly every day of September and October 2019 has a twin on 26 May 2022 or 3 November 2022: pure 2CELLOS, 40-odd plays, similarity above 0.98. Two and a half years apart, you rebuilt the same afternoon almost exactly, twice, and then never again.
The Hisaishi days
4 May 2021, 1 October 2023 and 3 July 2026: three days, three countries' worth of life, one composer. 3 July 2026 was the biggest of them at 147 plays.
Streaks
The longest run of consecutive days on which you played the same artist.
The overall record is 18 straight nights of Miracle Tones and Timo Krantz, 24 March to 10 April 2026 (they share the streak because the 432 Hz album features both). For music the record is far more modest: five days of Pascal Letoublon, 16 to 20 November 2022, when Friendships was new to you. Calvin Harris, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran each managed four days in June 2014, Christine and the Queens four in October 2021, Disturbed four in August 2026. You are a binger, not a streaker: you play something 50 times on a Tuesday, not five times a day for a month.
The Shannen Music Awards
Ten categories, every year, decided by the data. Artist of the Year is music only, with the sleep-audio winner noted where it differs. Pick a year.
The dinner party
Every year's version of you, seated at one table, based strictly on what each of them listened to. The host is 2026-you. Nobody has slept.
The Tourist
Singapore, skips 64% of everything, has heard four seconds of Paradise and loved it. Brought P!nk.
The Convert
Just moved to Britain, has learned the entire Radio 1 playlist in a summer, played All of Me 34 times, briefly a wedding DJ.
The Cinephile
Lord of the Rings and The Grand Budapest Hotel on loop, Firestone 42 times, discovered Chopin and Kygo in the same fortnight.
The Minimalist
45 hours all year. Ghibli piano, Amélie, one RIDSA song 16 times and a Disney afternoon. First to put shuffle on.
The Pianist
Chilly Gonzales's Chambers, Bach, Yoga Music, and a 97-play Aussie Christmas on 9 December.
The Explorer
Japan in May, Westeros in June, 1971 Quebec in September, Bon Entendeur in December, Oh Wonder at 2am.
The Superfan
2CELLOS 195 times, Mercy 29 times, a Eurovision party in May and another in December. Loudest person at the table.
The Hermit
Most diverse year ever, nothing on repeat, ambient piano and the Mandalorian. Peak listening hour: 8am.
The Looper
Tilted 56 times in a day, July 41 times in a week, Greatest American Hero 31 times in a morning. Repeat rate 53%.
The Returner
Ed Sheeran back with 170 plays, Queen, ABBA, Elton, Friendships 22 times in an evening. Wants to dance.
The Francophile
Imagine Dragons and Coldplay by day, Françoise Hardy and Zaz by November. 149 plays on 4 May.
The Sleeper
26 hours of music, 496 plays of Soothing Oasis. Kate Rusby for a week, Miley's Flowers, a 90s dance night in December.
The Reawakened
Hans Zimmer 121 times in a day, Golden 59 times, the French jazz singers, first Danish plays. Calmly all January.
The Host
432 Hz every night, 大葉奏子 86 times in an evening, Titanium, Levels, The xx's Intro, CYRIL remixes, Copenhagen.
2026: Welcome. Sit anywhere. I have put something on in the background.
2014: This is a single note.
2026: It is 432 Hz Bring Down Heart Rate. I have played it 328 times.
2019: I played Moon River by 2CELLOS more times than that and it had a tune.
2021: Everyone here has played one song more times than is reasonable. I did Tilted 56 times before lunch on a Monday. At least mine was French.
2023: Everything good is French. Françoise Hardy, Zaz, Madame Monsieur.
2019: Madame Monsieur is mine. I found Mercy in January 2019 and played it 29 times. You had the album version.
2021: The album version is better. Thirty-three plays to your thirty-one for the Eurovision one, so the data agrees.
2015: Could we talk about something with an orchestra? I brought the Grand Budapest Hotel score. Fifty plays in March.
2018: I brought Game of Thrones. Thirty-two plays in a week in June.
2015: And then?
2018: And then nothing, I was in Japan by then. Metaphorically. tricolor, ko-ko-ya, Hisaishi. You lot would not understand.
2016: I had Hisaishi first. Relax α Wave, Merry-Go-Round of Life, seven plays. I had him before it was a whole personality.
2026: I had him this July: 147 plays in a day. And then a Japanese pianist doing Kiki's Delivery Service 86 times on 25 August. So in a sense I win.
2014: None of you have mentioned Ed Sheeran.
2022: I did. 170 plays. Bad Habits 45 times. You had him first but I had him properly.
2014: I also had James Blunt.
Everyone: For one weekend.
2014: It was a good weekend.
2017: While we are confessing, on 9 December I played an Australian children's Christmas album 55 times.
2023: So did I. Christmas Day. It is a tradition now, apparently.
2020: I did not repeat a single thing all year. Highest diversity score at this table. I would like that noted.
2021: You had 975 plays. I had 1,011 and 75 of them were the same song. We both survived.
2024: I barely listened to music at all. Twenty-six hours. I was asleep.
2026: I know. I have your Soothing Oasis. I built on it.
2025: Can we agree on Hans Zimmer? Now We Are Free, 29 August, 121 plays. Even 2013 would like that.
2013: I skipped Paradise after four seconds. I do not like anything yet. That is the point of me.
2019: Right. Eurovision. Who is in?
2021: Discoteque by THE ROOP. Fifteen plays.
2023: Loreen. Tattoo. Topic remix, obviously.
2026: Fine. But after it we are all listening to The xx's Intro. Thirty-six times. Nobody skips. Nobody has ever skipped it.
2013: That was my tenth ever play.
2026: I know. That is why we are still here.
The playlist exchange
2014-you and 2026-you swap ten songs each. Predictions are based on what each version actually did with similar songs: 2026-you's skips and loops in the last twelve months, and 2014-you's plays and skips that year.
"Things you will have forgotten"
"Things you cannot hear yet"
The Shannen Stock Exchange
Every artist is a listed company and its share price is its rolling three-month share of your listening minutes. Two boards: the music board, and the whole market once the sleep-audio conglomerates floated.
Market retrospective
Ed Sheeran plc, Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, Calvin Harris
The only stocks that have traded in almost every year. Ed Sheeran has been traded in 63 separate months since its June 2014 listing, hit an all-time high of 38.7% of the market in April 2022 and trades today at 0.13%: a classic value stock, dormant for years and then a spectacular rally. Coldplay (50 months) and Imagine Dragons (47 months) never went above 11% but never delisted. Calvin Harris peaked twice, in 2014 and March 2019, and is quietly rising again.
2CELLOS, Chilly Gonzales, Calmly, Relax α Wave
Chilly Gonzales holds the music record for market share: 60.1% of all listening in September 2017, when Chambers was the only thing on. 2CELLOS took 28.5% in November 2019 and were fully delisted by February 2023. On the sleep board, Calmly went from nothing to 53.7% of the market in February 2025 and was worthless by March. Relax α Wave's 38.2% in 2016 is the earliest bubble on record. James Blunt is the shortest: one weekend, then bankrupt.
The 2016 correction and the 2024 great rotation
Total market volume fell 70% between 2015 and 2016 and every radio-pop ticker crashed together; Kygo, Hardwell and Kaskade never recovered their 2015 highs. In May 2024 money rotated out of music entirely and into sleep audio, which now holds three quarters of the exchange. Ed Sheeran, 2CELLOS and Coldplay all fell to near zero in the same twelve months.
HUNTR/X, 大葉奏子, TWO LANES, Miracle Tones
HUNTR/X floated in October 2025 on a single song and was the top music stock of the quarter. 大葉奏子 traded at nothing for four years after a 2022 listing and then went vertical on 25 August 2026. TWO LANES listed in July 2026 and is already top five. And Miracle Tones, listed 27 February 2026 with no prior history, took 83.5% of the entire exchange within three months, the largest monopoly position ever recorded on this market.
Juliette Armanet, Lana Del Rey, Ludwig Göransson, Calvin Harris
Juliette Armanet returned in 2025 after 1,901 days with a whole album's worth of trading (47 plays); Lana Del Rey after 868 days in April 2024; Ludwig Göransson after 2,081 days in 2026; Calvin Harris after four dark years in 2019; The Weeknd after 1,340 days in 2022 with Blinding Lights. The pattern is consistent: this market forgives.
Yann Tiersen, Joe Hisaishi, Max Richter, John Legend
None of them ever dominated (Hisaishi's high is 16.4% in April 2021, Tiersen's 15.5% in March 2014) but all of them have paid dividends across a decade: Tiersen in 25 months, Hisaishi in 20, Max Richter in 11 different years on tiny volumes. If you were building a pension out of this exchange, these are the holdings.
25 things Spotify Wrapped would never tell you
Longitudinal patterns first, top-artist trivia last. Every number is from the export.
- A quarter of your entire history is one artist you met in February.Miracle Tones: 10,217 of 38,823 listens (26.3%), first play 27 February 2026. Second place across thirteen years, Soothing Oasis, has 761.
- Your nights are now louder than your days.64% of 2026 listens fall between 11pm and 6am; in 2014 the figure was 9%. Summed across all years, 4am is your single biggest hour (116 hours), ahead of every waking hour.
- The 325 rule.All 143 Miracle Tones tracks have between 318 and 328 plays. That is the fingerprint of one album on repeat from start to finish, every night, with the phone stopping at roughly the same point each morning.
- You once listened for 17.7 hours in a day.16 February 2026. Music contributed a fraction of it; 121 days in your history have 100 plays or more.
- You have rejected the same song 109 times.Calvin Harris, I Need Your Love: 110 starts, 1 finish. It follows Summer on autoplay. Wrapped counts starts.
- January to July 2014 was wedding research.Wedding Music (59 starts, 58% skipped) and Piano Wedding Masters (47 starts, 74% skipped): Canon in D, Butterfly Waltz, Fireflies, auditioned for seconds each. Nothing like it appears before or after.
- Your songs have got shorter every year.Median length of a music play: 3.68 minutes in 2014, 3.45 in 2019, 2.89 in 2026. Part taste, part the two-minute ambient piano pieces creeping in.
- Shuffle came and went.1% of plays in 2014, 47% in 2016, 59% in 2018, 56% in 2020, then 0% in 2025. You shuffle when you are sampling and stop when you know what you want.
- Half of every artist you have ever played was a one-night stand.53% of your 5,373 music artists have exactly one listen. 12,931 tracks, most of them once.
- Coldplay is the only artist present in all fourteen calendar years.Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, Calvin Harris and David Guetta manage thirteen. Coldplay was also your first-ever play and your first-ever skip.
- Ed Sheeran hibernated for seven years.78 plays in 2014, then 17, 2, 5, 5, 6, 3, 4, then 170 in 2022. The 2022 total is more than 2014 to 2021 combined.
- Christmas is a real season, but only in odd years.Christmas-song plays: 62 (2014), 88 (2017), 74 (2018), 1 (2019), 85 (2023), 6 (2024). Your top Christmas song is Ariana Grande's Santa Tell Me (14), and Aussie Jingle Bells is the most-played track of any December.
- Eurovision arrives in waves.140 Eurovision-entry plays in 2019, 99 in 2021, then 33, 6, 3, and 18 so far in 2026. Mercy alone is 113 plays across two versions.
- You switched Mercy versions.In 2019 you played the Eurovision edit 29 times and the album version 8. In 2021 it was 33 album to 31 Eurovision. Every play since has been the Eurovision edit again.
- Ghibli rises every time you move.Ghibli-related plays: 87 in 2016, 91 in 2018, 81 in 2021, 108 in 2025, 168 in the first eight months of 2026. Four hundred and sixty-six in total, across at least ten different performers of the same tunes.
- French-language listening comes every other year.Plays of French-language artists: 66, 49, 49, 10, 120, 128, 1, 152, 6, 100, 46, 112, 18 from 2014 to 2026. Peaks in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025; troughs in 2017, 2020 and 2022.
- Friday is your music day and Saturday your quietest.3,780 music plays on Fridays against 2,069 on Saturdays. The only year Saturday won was 2020, when every day was a Saturday.
- Your peak listening hour has moved around the clock.4pm in 2014, 11am in 2015, 8am in 2020 and 2021, 5pm in 2022, 6pm in 2024 and 2025, 9am in 2026.
- Some loves were instant, some took a decade.Colin Buchanan: 55 of 71 plays in the first 30 days. Alexandre Desplat: 42 of 69. Joe Hisaishi: 2 plays in his first year, 164 across nine. Avicii: 1 play in 2013, 86 since. 大葉奏子: 1 play in 2022, 98 in 2026.
- You have a private party playlist.164 incognito plays. On 13 February 2019 between 21:49 and 22:24 they were California Gurls, I Knew You Were Trouble, Rude Boy, Mr. Brightside, When I Grow Up, Where Is The Love?, All The Small Things, Gold Digger and All Rise. Nobody was meant to know.
- Singapore 2025 was ocean sounds; Copenhagen is 432 Hz.Of 308 plays on a Singapore connection in 2025, the top artists were Ocean Therapy, Stardust Vibes and LUNIQ. Of 7,411 Danish listens, 3,872 are Miracle Tones. Home is where the sleep audio is.
- Offline mode is your flight playlist.The most-played artists in offline mode are Chilly Gonzales (18), Françoise Hardy (13), Imagine Dragons (10), Hans Zimmer (10) and Ed Sheeran (9). Piano, chanson, stadium, score, Ed. That is the whole taste in five downloads.
- You have not gone five weeks without Spotify since April 2016.Every gap longer than 37 days is from 2013 to 2016 (the record is 89 days, May to August 2013). Since 2 April 2016 the longest silence is 36 days, ending on the Aussie Christmas day of 9 December 2017.
- You prefer the remix to the original, three to one.Le temps est bon: Bon Entendeur's remix 24 plays, Isabelle Pierre's 1971 original 8, all in 2018. Likewise Sound of Silence (CYRIL remix, 27) over any Disturbed original (2).
- You have played 308 piano covers of songs you already own.Tracks titled "Piano Version": Milo Grande (Everglow), Marc Ventus, Oscar Lento, Liam Casablanca (Someone Like You, Save Your Tears), Flying Fingers (Someone You Loved, Easy On Me, Flowers), Antonio Mardini (Fix You, Shallow), Bastian Verte (The Scientist, 7 Years). Coldplay, Adele and Miley, translated for bedtime.