Just before the 2010s ended, Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped,” a visual evaluation of our non-public, converting music listening behavior over the past millennium. Seeing how familiar patterns and our tastes have changed over the years was both enlightening and entertaining. In fact, it was considered so entertaining that you could not open Instagram without seeing a series of reminders of people’s non-public wraps.
Now, what if you do not have to wait until December to get a brand new, up-to-date summary of your listening habits? Well, you do not need to appear for that now… we have got you covered! Spotify gives you the ability to export your non-public data, and Google gives you Google Data Studio, a free, easy-to-use data visualization device that makes it simple to do so. It might sound a little overwhelming, but rest assured that no technical knowledge is required – we have even got a ready-to-use template that you can use to make it look really good.
So without further ado, let us go step by step.
Download your Spotify information
- Spotify gives you the chance to get a copy of your 365 days of private data. Simply visit spotify.com, log in, click on the profile menu at the very top, and then click on Account.
- Now navigate to Privacy Settings from the menu on the left.
- Scroll all the way down to Download your information and click the Request button below step 1.
- Now you just have to wait a few days to receive an email from Spotify with a hyperlink to download your non-public data. This is not a large data set as it consists of textual information only.
- Once you receive the email, download your data and make sure to return to this newsletter to follow the steps below.
Prepare your information
- Unzip the downloaded zip record named my_spotify_data.zip by practically double clicking on it.
- A new folder will appear containing the information documents. Change to the folder named MyData.
- In order for Google Data Studio to examine our information, it must be in a CSV dataset or a Google Sheet. We will put it in a Google Sheet so we can put the information together a bit first.
- In the folder, familiarize yourself with any documents that start with StreamingHistory. If you have received more than this type of document, it means that you have listened to more than 10,000 songs in the last year, because Spotify divides your listening data into documents according to the 10,000 performances.
- Let us convert each of the documents starting with StreamingHistory from a JSON record to a CSV record so you can import it directly into a Google Sheet report. Simply go to csvjson.com/json2csv and click Select Record on the left, navigate to your MyData folder and select the first record that starts with StreamingHistory. Once it is uploaded (100%), click the Convert button and then the Download button. Repeat this process for all documents that start with StreamingHistory. Now you must have all your StreamingHistory documents as CSV documents in your Downloads folder.
- Go to drive.google.com and create a brand new Google Sheets report by clicking the New button in the top left corner. For example, name it Spotify Information.
- In the newly created Sheets report, navigate to the File menu and click Import. Select Upload and select the first of your StreamingHistory CSV documents that you received via the conversion website: csvjson.csv. Select Replace Modern Sheet and click the Import Information button. You have now imported the information directly into one sheet. Repeat this process for all csvjson.csv documents if you have downloaded more than one from the conversion website, e.g. csvjson (1).csv. However, make sure you first create a new sheet within the same report by using the + button on the lower left side each time you start a new import.
- Now you have all the songs you played last year in a single Google Sheet report. But we really need them in a single sheet, rather than multiple sheets within the same report, so that Google Data Studio can examine them all at once. To achieve this, let us combine the whole thing into a single sheet.
- Scroll all the way down to the bottom row of information in this first sheet. Now go to the second sheet of information (if you have more than one sheet). Remove the top line (the header line) of the second sheet of information by clicking the mouse on the ‘1’ to the left of the first line and clicking Delete Line.
- Now select the entire sheet with Command-A and use Command-C to replicate all the lines of information. Now go back to your first sheet, the base sheet, select the first empty box in column A below the information lines, and press Command-V to copy the information lines from the second sheet below. Repeat this process if you have more than one sheet of intercept information, so that all the information lines are captured on the first sheet. Delete any sheets that are not your base sheet this way by clicking the arrow next to the name of each sheet and clicking Delete.
- Now that we have all the music listening information in a single sheet, we need to expand our information a bit before we can visualize it with Google Data Studio. In mobileular E1, kind language. In molecular E2, type =DETECTLANGUAGE(C2) and press Enter. The program will now detect the language of the song based on the title and insert the language code into E2. To make sure that this record is inserted in all information lines, select E2 and double-click on the blue container in the bottom right corner of the selected modular.
Phew, now you have done the hardest part of the work. Now you just need to link your information to our Google Data Studio visualization template, which we will explain briefly below.
