I’ve been a Spotify user for a long time, and like a lot of people I have Google Timeline enabled on my phone, quietly logging where I’ve been over the years. And at some point earlier this year I downloaded my Spotify listen data, and it occurred to me that Spotify plays + location information could be an interesting thing to look at… Do I listen to the same stuff at work as I do at home? What about when I’m in other countries? The hypothesis was that my listening habits might vary quite a bit by location, and I wanted a way to actually see that rather than just wonder about it.
So after some data squishing, location guessing, and UI magic, I now have a basic app that loads this data (browser only), allows you to draw some geofences around certain areas, and then look at your Spotify listening data based on that.
The core concept is pretty simple. Spotify lets you export your full streaming history, which is a JSON file full of play events with timestamps. Google Takeout gives you your location history, also a JSON file with timestamped location points. If you line those up by timestamp, you can figure out where you were when each song played.
