Your all-time Spotify stats

What Spotify shows you, and how far back

Spotify gives you plenty of stats, but each one is a slice. Here’s where they live and how much of your history each covers.

In May 2026 Spotify marked its 20th anniversary with Your Party of the Year(s), a mobile recap of your entire history: your first song, your all-time top artist and a playlist of your top songs with play counts. It’s the closest the app has come to all-time stats. It was announced as a limited-time experience, though, and it’s a fixed set of cards. It can’t tell you what you played the summer you moved, or which artist you quietly stopped listening to.

For anything beyond those highlights, you need the raw record.

Get the full record: Extended Streaming History

Spotify keeps a log of every song you’ve played and will send you a copy. On spotify.com/account/privacy (opens in a new tab), under “Download your data”, tick Extended streaming history and confirm the email Spotify sends you. It’s free for every account, Premium or not.

Don’t pick “Account data” by mistake. That package only covers about the last year, with fewer details per play. The extended history goes back to the day you created your account.

It usually arrives within a few days. Our step-by-step export guide walks through every click and shows what’s inside the zip.

Count it yourself: top songs, artists and minutes

The zip holds a folder of JSON files named like Streaming_History_Audio_2019-2021.json. Each entry is one play, and four fields do most of the work:

• ts: when the play ended, in UTC.
• ms_played: how long it played, in milliseconds.
• master_metadata_track_name and master_metadata_album_artist_name: the song and artist.
• spotify_track_uri: empty for podcasts and audiobooks, which is how you filter them out.

Total minutes listened

Add up ms_played across every file and divide by 60,000. This is the all-time version of the minutes figure Wrapped shows.

Top artists

Rank artists by total time, or by number of plays. The two lists differ more than you’d expect: a long album artist wins on time, a singles artist on plays.

Top songs

Count plays per song, but decide first what a “play” is. Every skip is in the log too, so a song you skipped 200 times can outrank one you loved. Spotify counts a stream once it passes 30 seconds, and that’s a sensible cut-off for yours.

Four things that trip people up

• Time zones. ts is UTC and marks the end of the play, so a song at 11pm in New York lands on the next day. Convert before you ask “what do I play at night?”
• One song, several IDs. The same song can appear under more than one track URI (single, album, remaster). Group by name and artist, as above, not by URI.
• Zero-length plays. Exports contain plays with ms_played of 0. They don’t change your minutes, but they inflate raw play counts.
• Near-duplicates. Some records share a timestamp and song. Most are real, separate events, so think twice before deduplicating on those two fields alone.

Questions worth asking once you have it

A top-songs list is the first question, not the best one. Your whole history can answer things no recap will:

• What was the very first song I played on Spotify?
• Who was my most-played artist each year?
• What do I play at 3am that I never play at noon?
• Which artists did I love and then stop listening to?
• Do I skip more on shuffle?
• What was I listening to on my birthday, every year?

Each of these is a query over the same files. Some are one line; others, like “love and then stop”, take real thought about what “love” means in plays per month.

Or ask it in plain English

ListenLens does the counting for you. Upload the zip as it is, and ask any of the questions above in plain English. You get the answer with a table or chart, and a short note on how it was worked out. The gotchas above (time zones, skips, duplicate IDs) are already taken care of. You can also connect your history to Claude or ChatGPT and ask there.

Request your export today, then sign in to ListenLens and try it on a sample history until your file arrives. If you’re weighing up options, here’s how the different Spotify history analyzers compare.

Questions