Present a Compelling Data Story

At this time of year, many music fans eagerly await a summary of their listening habits over the last 12 months with Spotify Wrapped. Since 2016, the music streaming giant has provided its users with a packaged-up set of stats, revealing all your secrets, such as the fact that "Let It Go" was your most listened to track. This, alone, is pretty interesting, but what has made Spotify Wrapped such a success is they have presented the numbers with compelling visuals that are easy to share on social media.

And this clearly works. On Instagram, there are 562k posts tagged with #spotifywrapped and 26,500 posts tagged with #spotifywrapped2024.

And not being a company to miss out, Amazon has also followed this trend by introducing its own version with Amazon Music Delivered.

Once again, you'll notice the great visuals which make users feel this data is worth sharing.

Data Visualisation is Crucial

So, let's consider. Would you be as compelled to share this data if it had been presented in a bar chart? Or perhaps a basic pie chart showing the percentages of your most listened-to albums? I think we know.

There are some typical steps for anyone working on a data project:

• Find the data
• Prepare the data (clean, harmonise, categorise etc)
• Analyse the data
• Present the data

Each of these steps is, of course, vital to how your project is received, and yet it's the final process of presenting the data that can often turn a project from being good to great.

We are all familiar with tables and charts, which are even better when combined into a dashboard, but on some occasions, more interesting and playful infographics can be the ideal solution. You'll need to address a couple of questions when making that decision. What's the audience, how critical is the data, and how frequently does it need to be updated? Graphic-heavy options will take more time to produce, so also weigh up what level of effort and resources are appropriate.

Google Gets in on the Fun

There's also been a really interesting development this year that's seen Google partner up with Spotify For this year's Wrapped you can have a summary of your listening habits through the Audio Overview feature NotebookLM. Given that Spotify users are clearly a group that enjoys audio formats and the success of the Audio Overview feature, this is a great tie-up and one that will no doubt advance the number of people trying NotebookLM.

If you want to learn more about NotebookLM, you can read my two previous posts about it.

NotebookLM is Good

Google’s note taking app is not only useful, but can also be fun too, with the Audio overview addition being a killer feature.

Plain AISimon Cooper

NotebookLM Custom Audio

Google have updated the Audio Overview feature in NotebookLM so that you can now customise the response.

Plain AISimon Cooper

This article should inspire you and give you some thoughts on how visualisation plays a crucial part in the success of a data project, even with the simplest of data points.

(In case you were wondering, my most listened to artist this year was Shed Seven.)