Sweden-headquartered audio streaming platform Spotify is privy to vast amounts of listening data from its 345 million users (155 million of those are paying subscribers, per the company). In March of 2020, Dominika Mazur, Senior User Researcher at Spotify, was just beginning to work remotely full time and had been tasked with interpreting the signals coming from the noise.
“There were changes in behaviour we didn’t understand,” she told the MRS Impact conference (held virtually, March 2021). Spotify was seeing a 54% increase in listeners making nostalgia-themed playlists. Streams of music from the 1950s to the 1980s were...