Unlike last year, our friends at Spotify have managed to get a recap up this year: Your 2017 Wrapped. This year’s edition is pretty shitty, to be honest, but it contains some of the basic information you’d except from a company that knows everything about your listening habist. Another music service, Last.fm, provided an awesome summary feature last year that showed a lot more fine grained, and interesting data in their annual summaries. Unfortunately, they won’t be releasing the 2017 version until January 2018. It makes a lot of sense in terms of data availability, but doesn’t help me much since I’m writing my own summary now.

So we’ll have to make do with Spotify’s half-arsed effort. Here’s my 2017 in music according to Spotify:

Christian Girl Bands

Without further delay, let’s focus our attention on my second most popular song of 2017, “Hopp, Kenguru”, or “Jump, Kangaroo” as it translates from Norwegian to English. It sure sticks out like a tumor in between EDM and alt rock. What’s “Hopp, Kenguru”, anyway? It’s a children’s song by a Norwegian Christian girl band, SEVEN-jentene. The band “travels across the country, musicals, family worship, and gospel parties for kids” according to their website.

In other words: Not my usual cup of tea.

“Hopp, Kenguru” managed to wrestle its way into my most popular songs of 2017 because our first born somehow learned to sing the chorus from the song in kindergarten, and wanted to listen to it at home. I’ve been very careful with making sure Spotify’s private listen feature has been turned on while listening to this song, but as it turns out, Spotify is still tracking it, and was kind enough to leak data through their crappy Your 2017 Wrapped recap¹.

Looking at numbers

Did I mention that Spotify’s recap is really crappy this year? I guess I did. A proper yearly summary would have tons of data, lists, graphs, and tables. What it’s possible to take away from Spotify’s statistics is that

• I listened for 57,100 minutes, or roughly 40 days.
• During those 40 days, I listened to 5,000 different songs from 2,083 different artists.
• Those 5,000 songs spanned a total of 42 different genres, with ambient being the most popular one.

I’m listening to a hell of a lot of instrumental electronica at work, but I suspect that the ambient genre won this year’s popularity context because of the “Sleepy Music for Tired Insomniacs” playlist by Good Weather for an Airstrike. It’s absolutely perfect for programming sessions, and it’s been on heavy rotation for the last two months or so.

Like every year, I did discover a few new artists in 2017 as well. But Spotify doesn’t make it easy to figure out exactly which ones. I think we’ll have to wait for last.fm’s summary to go live in 2018 before we try to dive into the dirty details.