Surely in December, you received an email inviting you to explore your activity during the year. Yes, I know that Spotify year after year very kindly offers you your “year in review”, with information about your habits and consumption.

Screenshot: Spotify Mail “Year in review” 2020 This includes your playback activity, search history, among other things in JSON format. That is why I found it interesting to be able to take advantage of the fact that Spotify, like almost any application nowadays, allows you to download the personal data that it protects from your account. According to recent statistics, 35% of subscribers to a music streaming service worldwide have a subscription with Spotify, almost double the proportion who are subscribed to Apple Music, and well above Amazon, Deezer, and other platforms. Today, 17 years later, my ritual ceased to exist and there are very few stores that sell musical CDs, over time I completely replaced them with the convenience of being subscribed to the most popular music streaming service in the world: Spotify. And this also happens with the way we listen to and consume music. Like everything in life, as time goes by, music also changes and transforms, evolves (or strangely mutates?). “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music” - Aldous Huxley. Music is most likely one of those particular things that any civilization from another galaxy (if any) would signal us by identifying ourselves as the human race. I remember that being only about 15 years old (age in which most of us adopt a musical genre, bands, and artists with whom we feel identified), it represented a whole ritual for me, from the tireless search to that magical moment in which that first note of the first track played on the stereo or on the Discman with the headphones on properly, and at full volume. I can say with great pride that I was one of the people who still had the pleasure of going to the best music CD stores to buy the latest releases from their favorite artists. Dashboard to view stream history on Spotify.

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