Spotify's Insights blog has continued to turn out data-driven listener studies and November 12's case examines how a music listener "loves" their favorite musicians. The two kinds of love, they reckon, are "headphones" and "T-shirts."
This case focuses on Facebook and, of course, Spotify. The streaming service (and its data hub Echo Nest) looked at how much performers were streamed and correlated that to how many Facebook "likes" that act had. Those who had a huge amount of listens with relatively few likes were classified as "headphones," or groups enjoyed more in private. "T-shirts" were the performers who had huge amounts of fans on Facebook with relatively few streams to go with it.
The number of performers and the numbers that go with them aren't revealed but SPIN (who was apparently in tow for this project) provided a simple chart to give us an idea what performers were big on either side of the spectrum. Lana Del Rey had the most "headphone" fans, while Avicii, Bruno Mars, B.o.B. and Wiz Khalifa had similar results. Over on the "T-shirt" side, LMFAO apparently has the most fans with fewest plays, a "problem" shared by Bon Jovi, Bob Marley...and apparently two different versions of MGMT (we dunno...look for yourself).
Spotify is polite when all is said and done. When it looks at "T-shirts," it sees fans who are expressing love through the clothing they wear, and just don't listen to music much. When Music Times sees Marley on that side, they interpret "T-Shirts" to be people like their freshman roommate, who have huge Marley posters based strictly on his endorsement of marijuana. On the other hand, your correspondent has a Spotify account but has never once listened to his favorite band on it-we own the albums already—so doesn't it make our favorite band look worse as a result?
Ultimately without the numbers we can't make any definitive judgments here, and we're willing to bet that the numbers themselves aren't very telling. This study relies too much on the assumption that Spotify users only use the streaming service to listen to music.
Love what you listen and listen to what you love.
