Personal taste is a defining factor of daily music choice, but other influences can play a part as well. Things like culture, geographical location, and time of day or season can influence the type of music we play on a regular basis. This goes beyond the simplicity of playing Christmas music at Christmastime, and delves into a realm of more nuanced data.

In 2018, a paper was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior that looked through Spotify data from 2016 to determine listening patterns among subsets of users. The preliminary results, documented by PhD students at Cornell, found several ways to group listeners based on their music choices.

One of the variables that the paper tracked among users in 51 countries was based on music intensity. This ranged from “highly relaxing (acou

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