How every number is worked out
Every figure on depth.fm comes straight from your export, with no estimates or sampling. These are the definitions, and the limits of what the exports contain.
What do plays, streams and skips mean?
- Stream
- Any record in the export, however short. A track you skipped after one second is a stream.
- Play
- A stream of at least 30 seconds, the same line Spotify uses for royalty counts.
- Listening time
- Every millisecond played, added up. Streams overlapping on two devices both count, so a day can pass 24 hours.
- Skipped
- The platform flagged it as skipped, or it ended because you pressed next. Spotify only started filling in its own skipped flag reliably in late 2022; the next-button check keeps earlier years comparable.
- Session
- A run of streams with no gap longer than 30 minutes between one ending and the next starting.
- Day
- A calendar day in local time where you were streaming (see below).
- Days with listening
- Days with at least one stream. Days played, in tables, counts days with any stream of that artist, track or album.
- Streak
- Consecutive days with at least one play (30 seconds or more).
- First and last
- The first and last stream in the selected period.
Which time zone are the times in?
Spotify records when each stream ended, in UTC. depth.fm works back to when it started by subtracting the time played, then converts it to the local time of the country you were connected from, including summer time. For countries with several time zones (the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Brazil and others) it uses the most populous zone.
When an export has no country for a stream, the country you stream from most is used instead, or the time zone of the browser you uploaded from.
What happens to duplicates?
Spotify's files overlap: the same stream can appear in two files, and a second export repeats the first. Streams that match exactly are kept once. Spotify's 1-year Account data rounds times to the minute; when a stream from that file matches a stream in the extended history (same time played, ending in the same minute, same track, artist or title), only the more detailed one is kept.
What can't the exports tell you?
- Track lengths aren't included, so completion compares each stream with the longest time you ever played that track.
- Artists have no ids in Spotify's export, so artists with exactly the same name are treated as one.
- Device names are decoded from the platform strings Spotify logged; newer exports only say “windows” or “ios”.
- The 1-year Account data has no skips, shuffle, devices or countries.