The world is, to varying degrees, sheltering-in-place during this global coronavirus pandemic. Starting in March, the pandemic started to affect me personally:

• I started working from home on March 6th.
• Governor Gavin Newsom announced on March 11 that any gatherings over 250 people were strongly discouraged, effectively cancelling all concerts for the month of March.
• On March 16th, the mayor of San Francisco along with several other counties in the area, announced a shelter-in-place order.

Ever since then, I’ve been at home. Given all these changes in my life, I was curious what new patterns I might see in my music listening habits.

With large gatherings prohibited, I went to my last concert on March 7th. With gatherings increasingly cancelled nationwide, and touring musicians postponing and cancelling events, March 27th, Beatport hosted the first livestream festival, “ReConnect. A Global Music Series”. Many more followed.

Industry-wide studies and data analysis have attempted to unpack various trends in the pandemic’s influence on the music industry. Analytics startup Chartmetric is digging into genre-based listening, geographical listening habits, and Billboard and Nielsen conducting a periodic entertainment tracker survey.

Because I’m me, and I have so much data about my music listening patterns, I wanted to explore what trends might be emerging in my personal habits. I analyzed the months March, April, and May during 2020, and in some cases compared that period against the same period in 2019, 2018, and 2017. The screenshots of data visualizations in this blog post represent data points from May 15th, so it is an incomplete analysis and comparison, given that May in 2020 is not yet complete.

Looking at my listening habits during this time period, with key dates highlighted, it’s clear that the very beginning of the crisis didn’t have much of an effect on my listening behavior. However, after the shelter-in-place order, the amount of time I spent listening to music increased. After that increase it’s remained fairly steady.

Key dates such as the first case in the United States, the first case in California, and the first case in the Bay Area are highlighted along with other pandemic-relevant dates.

Listening behavior during March, April, and May over time #

When I started my analysis, I looked at my basic listening count from traditional music listening sources. I use Last.fm to scrobble my listening behavior in iTunes, Spotify, and the web from sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Hype Machine, and more.

If you just look at 2018 to 2020, it seems like my listening habits are trending upward, maybe with a culmination in 2020. But comparing against 2017, it isn’t much of a difference. I listened to 25% fewer tracks in 2018 compared with 2017, 19% more tracks in 2019 compared with 2018, and 25% more tracks in 2020 compared with 2019.

If I break that down by when I was listening by comparing my weekend and weekday listening habits from the previous 3 years to now, there’s still perhaps a bit of an increase, but nothing much.

With just the data points from Last.fm, there aren’t really any notable patterns. But number of tracks listened to on Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or iTunes provides an incomplete perspective of my listening habits. If I expand the data I’m analyzing to include other types of listening—concerts attended and livestreams watched—and change the data point that I’m analyzing to the amount of time that I spend listening, instead of the number of tracks that I’ve listened to, it gets a bit more interesting.

While the number of tracks I listened to from 2019 to 2020 increased only 25%, the amount of time I spent listening to music increased by 74%, a full 150 hours more than the previous year during this time period. And May isn’t even over yet!

It’s worth briefly noting that I’m estimating, rather than directly calculating, the amount of time spent listening to music tracks and attending live music events. To make this calculation, I’m using an estimate of 3 hours for each concert attended, 4 hours for each DJ set attended, 8 hours for each festival attended, and an estimate of 4 minutes for each track listened to, based on the average of all the tracks I’ve purchased over the past two years. Livestreamed sets are easier to track, but some of those are estimates as well because I didn’t start keeping track until the end of April.

I spent an extra 150 hours listening to music this year during this time—but when was I spending this time listening? If I break down the amount of time I spent listening by weekend compared with weekdays, it’s obvious:

Before shelter-in-place, I’d spend most of my weekends outside, hanging out with friends, or attending concerts, DJ sets, and the occasional day party. Now that I’m spending my weekends largely inside and at home, coupled with the number of livestreaming festivals, I’m spending much more of that time listening to music.

I was curious if perhaps working from home might reveal new weekday listening habits too, but the pattern remains fairly consistent. I also haven’t worked from home for an extended period before, so I don’t have a baseline to compare it with.

It’s clear that weekends are when I’m doing most of my new listening, and that this new listening likely isn’t coming from my traditional listening habits. If I split the amount of time that I spend listening to music by the type of listening that I’m doing, the source of the added time spent listening is clear.

Hello, livestreams. If you look closely you can also spy the sliver of a concert that I attended on March 7th.

Livestreams dominate, and so does Shazam #

All of the livestreams I’ve been watching have primarily been DJ sets. Ordinarily, when I’m at a DJ set, I spend a good amount of time Shazamming the tracks I’m hearing. I want to identify the tracks that I’m enjoying so much on the dancefloor so I can track them down, buy them, and dig into the back catalog of those artists.

So I requested my Shazam data to see what’s happening now that I’m home, with unlimited, shameless, and convenient access to Shazam. For the time period that I have Shazam data for, the correlation of Shazam activity to number of livestreams watched is fairly consistent at roughly 10 successful Shazams per livestream.

Given the correlation of Shazam data, as well as the continued focus on watching DJ sets, I wanted to explore my artist discovery statistics as well. Especially when it seemed like my listening activity hadn’t shifted much, I was betting that my artist discovery statistics have been increasing during this time. If I look at just the past few years, there seems to be a direct increase during this time period.

However, after I add 2017 into the list as well, the pattern doesn’t seem like much of a pattern at all. Perhaps by the end of May, there will be a correlation or an outsized increase. But at least for now, the added number of livestreams I’ve been watching don’t seem to be producing an equivalently high number of artist discoveries, even though they’re elevated compared with the last two years.

That could also be that the artists I’m discovering in the livestreams haven’t yet had a substantial effect on my non-livestream listening patterns, even if there’s 91 hours of music (and counting) in my quarandjed playlist where I store the tracks that catch my ear in a quarantine DJ set. Adding music to a playlist, of course, is not the same thing as listening to it.

Livestreaming as concert replacement? #

Shelter-in-place brought with it a slew of event cancellations and postponements. My live events calendar was severely affected. As of now, 15 concerts were affected in the following ways:

The amount of time that I spend at concerts compared with watching livestreams is also starkly different.

I’ve spent 151 hours (and counting) watching livestreams, the rough equivalent of 50 concerts—my entire concert attendance of last year. This is almost certainly because I’m often listening to livestreams, rather than watching them happen.

Concerts require dedication—a period of time where you can’t really do anything else, a monetary investment, and travel to and from the show. Livestreams don’t have any of that, save a voluntary donation. That makes it easier to turn on a stream while I’m doing other things. While listening to a livestream, I often avoid engaging with the streaming experience. Unless the chat is a cozy few hundred folks at most, it’s a tire fire of trolls and not a pleasant experience. That, coupled with the fact that sitting on my couch watching a screen is inherently less engaging than standing in a club with music and people surrounding me, means that I’m often multitasking while livestreams are happening.

The attraction for me is that these streams are live, and they’re an event to tune into, and if you don’t, you might miss it. Because it’s live, you have the opportunity to create a shared collective experience. The chatrooms that accompany live video streams on YouTube, Twitch, and especially with Facebook’s Watch Party feature for Facebook Live videos, are what foster this shared experience. For me, it’s about that experience, so much so that I started a chat thread for Jamie xx’s 2020 Essential Mix so that my friends and I could experience and react to the set live.

This personal experience is contrary to the conclusion drawn in this article on Hypebot called Our Music Consumption Habits Are Changing, But Will They Remain That Way? by Bobby Owsinski: “Given the choice, people would rather watch something than just listen.”.

Given the choice, I’d rather have a shared collective experience with music rather than just sit alone on my couch and listen to it.

Of course, with shelter-in-place, I haven’t been given a choice between attending concerts and watching livestreamed shows. It’s clear that without a choice, I’ll take whatever approximation of live music I can find.