Research conducted by Uswitch has revealed the ultimate commuting playlist by analysing 45,000 songs from 200 different commuting playlists on Spotify.
This research is part of a wider study into the most popular albums, artists and songs on commuting playlists and revealed that Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits is currently the world’s most popular commuting song, with a popularity score of 100 out of 100.
Streamed over 457,512,174 number of times on Spotify, the track also appears in over 10% of the playlists analysed (22/200), the third highest of all songs analysed.
The collection of songs, along with their respective artists and albums, was facilitated by the Spotify Python Library which was used to interface with the official Spotify API.
This was also used to determine Spotify’s popularity of each song – which Spotify states “is calculated by an algorithm and is based, in the most part, on the total number of plays the track has had and how recent those plays are. Generally speaking, songs that are being played a lot now will have a higher popularity ranking than songs that were played a lot in the past”.
Following the collection of data, the information regarding artists was pre-processed and joined into a new variable – relative popularity. This is a weighted average based upon Spotify’s general ‘track popularity’ and the number of appearances each track has through all 200 playlists.
