What the Spotify Takeout Contains

Remember how I found that Spotify requires up to 30 days to provide me with a copy of my personal data? It turns out they turned it around in 6 days. Still longer than makes any sense at all, but, still, faster than a month.

The download link I was emailed today provided me with a ZIP file with these JSON files compressed inside it:

FamilyPlan.json

My mailing address.

Follow.json

How many people I’m followed, how many people are following me (but not their names, in either case) and a list of the bands I’m following:

{
  "followerCount": 10,
  "followingUsersCount": 57,
  "followingArtists": [
    "Anna Of The North",
    "Ben Lee",
    "Craig Cardiff",
    "Port Cities",
    "Siv Jakobsen",
    "The Weather Station",
    "William Prince",
    "the bird and the bee"
  ]
}

Identity.json

The basics about me:

{
  "displayName": "",
  "firstName": "",
  "lastName": "",
  "imageUrl": "https://profile-images.scdn.co/images/userprofile/small/d8ef6639b84a9ca697c456f3cfad144cb4d7e917",
  "largeImageUrl": "https://profile-images.scdn.co/images/userprofile/default/355873943e7307fffd422ca1d3e80ea8950d241b",
  "tasteMaker": false,
  "verified": false
}

I suppose I’ve never given Spotify my first or last names; it came up with its own determination that I’m not a “tasteMaker.”

Payments.json

My payment information (with all but the last four digits of my credit card redacted). Oddly, my credit card is out of date, but they keep billing me anyway.

Playlist.json

All of the my playlists and all of their tracks, like this:

{
  "playlists": [
    {
      "name": "DinnerParty",
      "lastModifiedDate": "2018-08-28",
      "items": [
        {
          "track": {
            "trackName": "Small Victory",
            "artistName": "Garnet Rogers",
            "albumName": "All That Is - The Songs Of Garnet Rogers"
          },
          "episode": null,
          "localTrack": null
        },

SearchQueries.json

The last 90 days of my search queries. For each query there’s the date, the platform (DESKTOP, ANDROID), the country, the query (typed or selected) and something called userIntent, which is one of “navigate-forward,” “nav-back-up-toolbar-button,” or “play.”

  {
    "date" : "2019-07-02",
    "platform" : "DESKTOP",
    "country" : "CA",
    "terminationReason" : "INTERACTION",
    "msDuration" : 0,
    "typedQuery" : null,
    "selectedQuery" : "lovers in a dangerous time",
    "userIntent" : "navigate-forward",
    "viewUri" : "spotify:search:lovers in a dangerous time"
  }

StreamingHistory.json

A list of all the tracks I’ve streamed, the date and time I streamed them, and how much of the track I listened to (in milliseconds) like this:

  {
    "endTime" : "2019-07-12 18:41",
    "artistName" : "Henry Jamison",
    "trackName" : "Real Peach",
    "msPlayed" : 151837
  },
  {
    "endTime" : "2019-07-12 18:44",
    "artistName" : "This Is The Kit",
    "trackName" : "Bullet Proof",
    "msPlayed" : 17452
  },
  {
    "endTime" : "2019-07-12 18:44",
    "artistName" : "Maisie Peters",
    "trackName" : "I'll Be There For You - Recorded at Metropolis Studios, London",
    "msPlayed" : 9503
  },

The streaming history continues up to yesterday, despite my request for the data being submitted on July 6.

I got a quick overview of which artists I’ve been streaming a lot of with:

grep artistName StreamingHistory.json  | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more

which showed me these as the top 10:

  59     "artistName" : "Port Cities",
  42     "artistName" : "Thomas Newman",
  35     "artistName" : "Max Richter",
  30     "artistName" : "Mark Isham",
  26     "artistName" : "Ingrid Michaelson",
  23     "artistName" : "Jane Siberry",
  21     "artistName" : "Ólafur Arnalds",
  19     "artistName" : "Barenaked Ladies",
  17     "artistName" : "Christine and the Queens",
  15     "artistName" : "The East Pointers",

I went on a Barenaked Ladies kick this week when I got a little obsessed with the line “I just made you say underwear” in the song Pinch Me.

Userdata.json

Some more information about me (I’ve redacted a few bits myself):

{
  "username": "peter.rukavina",
  "email": "XXXXX",
  "country": "CA",
  "createdFromFacebook": false,
  "facebookUid": null,
  "birthdate": "YYYY-MM-DD",
  "gender": "male",
  "postalCode": "C1A 4R4",
  "mobileNumber": null,
  "mobileOperator": null,
  "mobileBrand": "Android",
  "creationTime": "2014-08-06"
}

YourLibrary.json

All the tracks in my “Library.” To be honest I’ve never understood Spotify’s high-level concepts, including “Library.” But certainly I have some things in it, like:

    {
      "artist": "The Weather Station",
      "album": "The Weather Station"
    },
    {
      "artist": "Jóhann Jóhannsson",
      "album": "Orphée"
    },
    {
      "artist": "Martha Wainwright",
      "album": "Goodnight City"
    },

Oliver’s Data

On the same day I requested my data, Oliver requested his, and he got his download link today to.

The structure of his dump is identical to mine, except that he has a lot more of everything. For example, his Playlist.json file is 2.9 million lines in it, and contains 4,582 playlists containing a total of 318,762 tracks.

Unfortunately, going back to the spark that took us down this road in the first place, nowhere in the data dump is anything about the podcasts Oliver has subscribed to.

Further confirming that Spotify is, indeed, a prison for podcasts.