Music streaming practices. Spotify usage in Romania

This publication provides an overview of music streaming practices, taking the use of the Spotify platform in Romania as a case study. Given that streaming has become the dominant form of cultural consumption nowadays (Arditi, 2021), analyzing the consumption trends and preferences recorded in Spotify charts in Romania becomes relevant. Spotify is a popular digital music streaming service that provides users with access to a vast library of songs, podcasts and other audio content from various artists and creators around the world.

This analysis of music trends in Spotify’s music charts in Romania aims to reveal the dynamic evolution of music tastes of Romanian consumers. The study comprises three major categories of information collected:

• Data contextualizing the practice of music streaming in Romania;
• Delineation and categorization of the streamed music genres;
• Popularity of songs, artists and genres in the form of hierarchies.

The data used for the analysis in this publication was collected from Spotify using automated processes such as the Application Programming Interface (API), a programmable interface for connecting two platforms. The Spotify Web API enables the creation of applications that can interact with the Spotify streaming service, such as retrieving content metadata. The data collected through the Spotify Web API comes from two sources: on the one hand, we used datasets aggregated by the Kworb.net platform through Spotify’s public API. At the same time, datasets collected directly by the INCFC team through the Spotify Web API were also used.

The dataset contains a selection of songs resulting from the daily charts of the most played songs in Romania. This aggregation method, used for the interval 14.03.2018-18.03.2023, extracted 5747 songs that were in a daily top at least once during the analysed period. This selection does not cover all the songs streamed by Spotify users in Romania. Therefore, the results of the analysis do not cover all Romanian Spotify users, but only the consumption patterns captured by these charts. The main indicators tracked were the number of songs streams, song characteristics and their placement in the analysed period.

The statistical processing, categorisation and taxonomy, as well as the visual structuring of the data were carried out by the authors.

• Authors: Maria Trifon, Alin Savu, Bogdan Pălici
• Software developer: Dinu Ion
• Web developer: Cristian Georgescu