How to download your complete Spotify listening history, and what is in the files
Spotify will send you every play it has on record, back to the day the account was opened. How to ask for it, how long it takes, and how to read the files that arrive.
The yearly summary a streaming service shows you covers about ten months and a handful of headline figures. The record behind it is far larger. Spotify keeps an entry for every time you pressed play, and data protection law in many places gives you the right to a copy. The service offers it to every account holder, free, and it reaches back to the first track you ever streamed.
There are two different exports
This is the part that catches people out. The download page offers more than one package, and only one of them is the full history.
| Package | What it covers | Typical wait |
|---|---|---|
| Account data | Playlists, your library, search queries and streaming history for roughly the last year | A few days |
| Extended streaming history | Every play for the life of the account, with much more detail on each one | Up to 30 days |
| Technical log information | Diagnostic records of how the apps were used | Up to 30 days |
For a complete record you want Extended streaming history. It is not ticked by default.
How to request it
- Sign in to your account on the Spotify website. The request cannot be made from the mobile app's settings.
- Open your account page and find the privacy section, labelled Account privacy or Privacy settings.
- Scroll to Download your data.
- Tick Extended streaming history. Untick the others unless you want them too.
- Press the request button, then confirm using the link in the email Spotify sends you. The request does not start until you confirm.
- Wait for a second email saying the files are ready. In practice it often arrives within one or two weeks. The download link expires, so save the archive when it comes.
What arrives
The download is a ZIP archive. Inside is a short PDF describing the fields, and a set of files
with names like Streaming_History_Audio_2019-2021_3.json. Each file holds some thousands
of plays, and a long-lived account may have a dozen or more. Video plays, such as video podcasts,
come in separate files.
The files are JSON, a plain text format. Any text editor will open one, though a file of this size is not pleasant to read that way.
What each play records
Every entry is one play, and it carries these fields among others:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
ts | The moment the play ended, in UTC |
ms_played | How long it played, in milliseconds |
master_metadata_track_name | The track |
master_metadata_album_artist_name | The artist |
master_metadata_album_album_name | The album |
spotify_track_uri | Spotify's own identifier for the track |
reason_start, reason_end | Why the play began and ended, such as a tap, the end of the previous track, or a skip |
shuffle, skipped, offline | Whether each of those was true |
platform | The kind of device used |
conn_country | The country the play was made from |
Podcast episodes use a matching set of episode fields in place of the track ones.
Reading the numbers correctly
- Times are in UTC. A play at 11 pm in California is stamped 6 or 7 am the next day. Convert to your own time zone before asking what you listen to at night.
- The timestamp is the end of the play, not the start. Subtract
ms_playedto find when it began. - Not every entry is a listen. A track skipped after two seconds is recorded like any other. Most analyses count a play only when it lasted 30 seconds or more, which is also the threshold the industry uses for a stream.
- Minutes tell a different story from play counts. A listener who plays long pieces will find that ranking by time and ranking by count give different favourites. Both are true.
- Some entries have no track name. Tracks removed from the catalogue, and local files, can appear with empty fields.
Things worth looking for
A decade of plays answers questions the yearly summary never asks. Which artist have you played in every single year? Which album did you play forty times in one month and never again? How did your listening change when you moved, changed jobs or had a child? What do you actually play at two in the morning? The skip rate of a track is its own measure of affection: the songs you never skip are not always the ones you would name.
A note on privacy
The export also contains the network addresses your plays were made from, along with the device and the country. Together with the timestamps that is a detailed record of where you were and when you were awake. Treat the archive as you would a diary. If you give it to a website or an app to analyse, find out first whether the files are processed on your own device or uploaded, and remove the address field if you plan to share a file with anyone.