New music

Twenty artists you have never heard, and would love

Every name below is absent from all 4,979 artists in your history. Each one is chosen because two or three artists you already play point straight at it, and each comes with the one song to try first.

Melodic house

Indie electronic

UK indie

Neo-classical and soundtrack

Folk and singer-songwriter

Jazz, downtempo and swing

Breaks and progressive

Big-voice pop

The thirty-song discovery playlist

Thirty tracks, thirty artists, none of them in your history. Ten come from the section above; the other twenty are new even to this report. It is sequenced as a real set: five quiet openers, a slow build through soul and disco, a run of eleven dancefloor tracks, then six to bring you back down.

The opening leans on the piano and jazz side of your listening, because that is what you play in the mornings (Chilly Gonzales, Taylor Swift and Olivia Dean all over-index before noon). The build borrows from Jungle and Bill Withers. The peak is aimed at the Era 8 you: Elderbrook, Model Man, DROELOE, with a detour through the 2013 indie-disco you played on a Mac in Singapore. The wind-down returns to the soundtrack shelf.

Opening

1. Glass Hania RaniThe nearest new thing to the 91 morning plays of Basmati.
2. Opus 23 Dustin O'HalloranFor the 77 plays of Federico Albanese's Carousel #3.
3. Keep On Alfa MistKind of Blue chords over hip-hop drums, for the 2018 Miles Davis spring.
4. Ruins Portico QuartetNick Mulvey's old band; you have 243 Mulvey plays and none of this.
5. Love Is All The Tallest Man On EarthThe Swedish fingerpicker to follow José González (336 plays).

Build

6. Lille Lisa HanniganHushed and close, for the Daughter (140) and Meadowlark (148) years.
7. La Prima Estate Erlend ØyeKings of Convenience's singer, in Italian; you have 22 Kings of Convenience plays.
8. Artifice SOHNElectronic soul between Adele's voice and The xx's space (374 plays).
9. Super Duper Love (Are You Diggin' on Me?) Pt. 1 Joss StoneThe retro-soul record that preceded 19 (866 album plays).
10. Colors Black PumasJungle's groove with Michael Kiwanuka's ache (124 plays).
11. Wandering Eye Fat Freddy's DropNew Zealand, like Minuit (388 plays), but with horns.
12. Black Baby Kruder & DorfmeisterYou played a Dorfmeister remix eight times in 2009 and never followed it.
13. Harvest Moon PoolsideNeil Young at 100 bpm; the Jungle tempo, the Bakermat mood (242 plays).

Peak

14. Amor Fati Washed OutShrines-era haze (277 album plays) with a chorus you can drive to.
15. Lights & Music Cut CopyThe Melbourne record between Empire Of The Sun (407) and Miike Snow (261).
16. All You're Waiting For ClassixxLA disco with Nancy Whang singing; for the Flight Facilities Crave You obsession (169 plays).
17. Into the Galaxy Midnight JuggernautsAustralian space-disco, the missing link between Daft Punk (219) and Empire Of The Sun.
18. Here's the Thing Sports TeamA shouted chorus for the Kooks fan who found Wet Leg last year.
19. Someday WevalDutch duo; the Maribou State sound (106 plays) with a bigger kick.
20. Deja Vu LastlingsAustralian siblings on RÜFÜS DU SOL's label; you have 81 RÜFÜS plays.
21. Lailonie MarshAnjunadeep at its most weightless, for the 43 Ben Böhmer plays of 2025.
22. Grey KölschCopenhagen melodic techno; the Model Man Clarity feeling (50 plays) at club volume.
23. Buggin' Hot Since 82Where Calvin Harris (897 plays) would have gone if he had stayed in the clubs.
24. We Want Your Soul Adam FreelandNu-skool breaks, 2003; the Hybrid and Oakenfold summer of 2011 in one track.

Wind-down

25. Sunset Lover Petit BiscuitTropical house without the drop, for the Klingande (130) and Kungs (75) years.
26. Recovery Rival ConsolesErased Tapes electronics between Hybrid's breaks and Ólafur Arnalds' piano.
27. Lucid Kelly Lee OwensA Welsh whisper over a slow pulse, for the 8% of your listening after midnight.
28. Sleeping Lotus Joep BevingDutch solo piano; the Solo Piano album (157 plays) with the lights off.
29. Requiem for the Static King Part One A Winged Victory for the SullenFor the Max Richter Recomposed year (109 plays in 2022).
30. Fólk fær andlit Hildur GuðnadóttirIcelandic cello to close, the way Ólafur Arnalds' Particles closed 2017.

Your biggest blind spots

These are not obscurities. They are acclaimed, influential artists that the rest of your library keeps pointing at, and every one of them has zero listens in seventeen years.

Artists who sit exactly between two artists you love

Eight pairs from your history, and for each the artist who lives at the midpoint. None of the eight midpoints has a single listen in your export.

How have you never listened to this?

Ten absences that are hard to believe given what surrounds them. All ten have zero listens. One song each; the point is speed.

One step outside the comfort zone

Nine recommendations, each reached from an artist you love by changing exactly one thing: the tempo, the era, the language, the instrument or the scene. Everything else stays put.

Three steps outside

Eight riskier destinations. Each is reached from a named artist in your history in exactly three moves, and the middle steps are artists you have either played or sampled, so the path is real rather than theoretical.

1. Avicii to Trentemøller

Avicii led you to deadmau5's progressive house in 2013; deadmau5's early minimalism leads to Booka Shade's Berlin tech-house, which you finally sampled last year; Booka Shade's Scandinavian contemporary Anders Trentemøller takes the same clean kick drum somewhere colder and more guitar-heavy. Song: Miss You.

2. Adele to Sarah Vaughan

Adele's own touchstones are the 1960s soul singers; Nina Simone is the one you followed her to. Simone leads to Billie Holiday, whose phrasing she studied. Holiday leads to Sarah Vaughan, her contemporary, who had the biggest range of any jazz singer and whom you have never heard. Song: Lullaby of Birdland.

3. Jungle to Shuggie Otis

Jungle's falsetto soul points back to Withers; Withers shares a decade and a label culture with Gaye; Gaye's studio experiments lead to Shuggie Otis, who recorded Inspiration Information almost alone, playing every instrument, including one of the first drum machines on a soul record. It is where Jungle's whole aesthetic comes from. Song: Strawberry Letter 23.

4. Chilly Gonzales to Angelo Badalamenti

Gonzales is a pianist who writes like a film composer; Jon Brion is a film composer who writes like a pianist (Eternal Sunshine). Brion leads to Thomas Newman, the other great American melodist of small-scale scores. Newman leads to Badalamenti, whose Twin Peaks music is the same warm piano and strings pushed until it becomes uncanny. Song: Laura Palmer's Theme.

5. Hybrid to Tricky

Hybrid and DJ Shadow both build tracks from breakbeats and film dialogue, and you played both hard in 2011. Shadow produced UNKLE's Psyence Fiction, which you touched once. UNKLE's James Lavelle came out of the same trip-hop moment as Tricky, who left Massive Attack (153 plays of yours) to make Maxinquaye, the darkest record of that whole scene. Song: Hell Is Round the Corner.

6. The Kooks to Yard Act

The Kooks are 2006 indie; Jamie T is the next year's indie with rapping. Jamie T learned that from Mike Skinner of The Streets, whom you have sampled once. The Streets' talked, funny, English lyrics are the direct model for Yard Act's James Smith, whose band plays a tight, danceable post-punk underneath. Song: The Overload.

7. Nick Mulvey to Tinariwen

Mulvey studied music in Havana and plays West African-influenced guitar cycles; Xavier Rudd, whom you found in the same era, does the same with Australian roots. Both point at Ali Farka Touré, the Malian who showed that the blues came from the Sahara. Touré leads to Tinariwen, the Tuareg band who electrified that guitar style. Song: Cler Achel.

8. Taylor Swift to Joanna Newsom

Swift duetted with Florence on Florida!!!; Florence has always cited Kate Bush; Bush leads to Joanna Newsom, the Californian harpist who writes the most ambitious, wordy songs of anyone alive. Start with the shortest one. Song: Peach, Plum, Pear.

The rabbit hole

One chain, nine hops, starting from your most durable indie-electronic act and ending in 1970s Nigeria. Every hop is adjacent to the one before it, and the last one circles back to a band you have played 488 times.

Start with Everybody Loves the Sunshine, then Maria También, Goca Dünya, İnce İnce, Yègellé Tezeta, Tche Belew and finish on Fantastic Man.

Where we ended up: a self-taught Nigerian businessman who built a studio in Enugu, recorded eight albums of eight-minute synthesizer funk between 1977 and 1985, then became a born-again Christian and refused to discuss any of it for the rest of his life. Fantastic Man is one riff, a drum machine and a chorus of women singing about how good he looks, for as long as he felt like keeping it going. It should be a novelty. It is instead one of the most joyful records ever made.

The reason you might stay is that the route never actually left your taste, it only left your map. Jungle's whole aesthetic is 1970s soul rhythm played with electronic discipline; so is Onyeabor's. Khruangbin, the pivot of the chain, are the only band here you had already sampled, and they are the ones who made the case that a groove is a groove whether it was recorded in Houston, Istanbul or Addis Ababa. And the final hop returns you home: when Luaka Bop reissued Onyeabor in 2013, the tribute band assembled to play the songs live included Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip (Over And Over, 184 plays) and Damon Albarn (Mr Tembo, 77 plays across eleven years). You had, in a sense, already been to this party. You just left before the band came on.

Five rabbit holes, five stages each

Five starting points from five different eras of your listening, each followed five steps out. Stage one is a small step; stage five is somewhere you would not have gone on your own.

From Avicii (1,427 plays) into French electronica

Songs in order: Sunset Lover, Aloha, Canopée, Tadow, Le temps est bon. You logged 446 listens in France in 2023 and 177 this year. This is what was on in the bar.

From Adele (1,105 plays) into Americana

Songs in order: Cover Me Up, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Look at Miss Ohio, Pancho and Lefty, Angel from Montgomery. The Neil Diamond (38 plays) and Tom Cochrane (43) detours of 2022 suggest this is a door you have already leaned on.

From Chilly Gonzales (Basmati, 138 plays) into 1960s Paris

Songs in order: Tearjerker, It's Raining Today, Ballade de Melody Nelson, L'enfant assassin des mouches, Les Moulins de mon cœur.

From The xx (374 plays) into drone

Songs in order: Final Day, Heaven or Las Vegas, Alison, Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping, Requiem for Dying Mothers, Part 1.

From DROELOE (310 plays) into video game scores

Songs in order: Sad Machine, Endless Fantasy, Sweden, Adventure, Nascence. You already play a game soundtrack without thinking of it as one: An Endless Desert was your seventh track of 2019.

Songs you should already know

Twenty-five canon tracks that sit right beside your taste and are not in your history. The artist is absent in every case, so there is no ambiguity about whether you have heard the song.

1. The Model Kraftwerk, 1978The template for Hot Chip (488), Goldfrapp (375) and Röyksopp (303).
2. Archangel Burial, 2007The record The xx's Intro (128 plays) grew out of.
3. Roygbiv Boards of Canada, 1998Two and a half minutes that Tycho (110) has spent a career on.
4. Avril 14th Aphex Twin, 2001The solo piano piece every Basmati fan (138 plays) already half knows.
5. Two Thousand and Seventeen Four Tet, 2017Harp loops and a soft kick; the Bonobo (120) shelf's missing centrepiece.
6. Silhouettes (I, II & III) Floating Points, 2015Jazz drums and analogue synths, between Miles Davis (103 in 2018) and Jamie xx (70).
7. Made to Stray Mount Kimbie, 2013Post-dubstep with a vocal; you played SBTRKT 91 times and skipped their neighbours.
8. By Your Side Sade, 2000For the 347 Norah Jones plays. The most-loved slow song in Britain.
9. Ol' 55 Tom Waits, 1973A piano ballad Norah Jones fans arrive at eventually. You have not.
10. The Blower's Daughter Damien Rice, 2002The root of isaac gracie (122), Meadowlark (148) and James Vincent McMorrow (117).
11. Be Good or Be Gone Fionn Regan, 2006Irish fingerpicking for the Nick Mulvey (243) years.
12. The Water Johnny Flynn with Laura Marling, 2010The Mumford & Sons (262) scene's best single song.
13. The Gardener The Tallest Man On Earth, 2008If José González (336) is one Swedish guitarist, this is the other.
14. Heaven or Las Vegas Cocteau Twins, 1990Mazzy Star's Into Dust (55 plays over 16 years) came from here.
15. Alison Slowdive, 1993Shoegaze's gentlest song, for the Daughter (140) and Cigarettes After Sex (21) evenings.
16. Take Me Somewhere Nice Mogwai, 2001Slow guitars that do what Max Richter (131) does with strings.
17. Chariots of Fire Vangelis, 1981You know the tune. You have never played it. Hans Zimmer (101) owes it everything.
18. Dirge Death In Vegas, 1999One bass note and a woman humming; the Prodigy (301) generation's slow song.
19. The Gift Way Out West, 1996Progressive breaks from Bristol, released two years before Hybrid (733) got going.
20. Flaming June BT, 1997Oakenfold (322) played this every night of 1997.
21. Hearts on Fire Cut Copy, 2008Australian synth-pop; the year you should have found it, you found Empire Of The Sun (407) instead.
22. Feel It All Around Washed Out, 2009Chillwave's founding single, for the Purity Ring (283) summer of 2013.
23. In the Morning Junior Boys, 2006Canadian synth-pop with the Hot Chip (488) melancholy built in.
24. Fell in Love with a Boy Joss Stone, 2003A White Stripes song sung like Aretha, four years before Adele (1,105) arrived.
25. Moan Trentemøller, 2006The after-midnight track (8% of your listens) your Model Man (157) habit is looking for.

One album for every year, 2010 to 2026

For each year, one album you have never played, chosen to match what you were listening to at the time. The release date is irrelevant; the fit is not. Every album title has zero plays in your export and, with one exception noted below, so does the artist.

Ten albums that could become all-time favourites

Ranked by how likely each is to end up beside Torches (954 plays), 19 (866) and the Jungle album (536) in your top albums list. Every one has zero plays, and every one is built to be played from the first track to the last.

1. Untrue by Burial (2007) 82% confidence
   The reasoning is arithmetic. You have 374 plays of The xx, 70 of Jamie xx, 91 of SBTRKT, 153 of Massive Attack, and Model Man, Mild Minds and DJ Seinfeld all over-index after midnight. Untrue is the record all of those artists cite, and it is 50 minutes designed to be heard alone in the dark with headphones. Your 8% after-midnight share is the audience for it.

2. Mare by Christian Löffler (2016) 78% confidence
   Your Era 8 is Maribou State (106), Bonobo (87), Parra for Cuva (43 in 2025) and Ben Böhmer (43). Mare is the album that sits at the exact centre of those four, and unlike most house records it was written as an album, with a tide of field recordings running through it. It rewards the start-to-finish listen more than anything else you currently play.

3. The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man On Earth (2010) 74% confidence
   José González's Walter Mitty soundtrack has 223 plays and Junip's Line Of Fire 77. Kristian Matsson is the other Swedish guitarist of that generation, and The Wild Hunt is ten songs in 35 minutes, no filler, ending on a piano ballad (Kids on the Run) that sounds like it was written for the end of your Era 5.

4. Lumiere by Dustin O'Halloran (2011) 72% confidence
   Federico Albanese (95 plays), Ólafur Arnalds (64), Max Richter (131 in Era 7) and Jon Brion (82). O'Halloran is the fifth name on that shelf and Lumiere, piano and string quartet recorded in Berlin, is his most complete statement. The one risk is that it is quieter than Recomposed; the reward is that it is better sequenced.

5. Diamond Life by Sade (1984) 68% confidence
   Norah Jones is your 25th artist of all time (347 plays) and Sunrise has been with you since 2011. Diamond Life is the record Norah Jones's producers were thinking of: nine songs, no weak track, and a band that never plays a note more than it needs. Smooth Operator is the hit; the deep cuts are the reason to stay.

6. Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada (1998) 64% confidence
   Tycho (110), Gold Panda (55), Bonobo (120) and even Todd Baker's Monument Valley music (68) are descendants of this. It is an album, not a collection: 17 tracks that run into each other, with interludes that only make sense in sequence. If Roygbiv lands, the rest follows.

7. Intensify by Way Out West (2001) 62% confidence
   Hybrid's Wider Angle (251 plays) and Disappear Here (399) are two of your top twenty albums. Intensify is the third album in that trilogy that Hybrid never made: Bristol progressive breaks with a live vocalist, released in the same eighteen months. Mindcircus is the single; the album is the point.

8. Within and Without by Washed Out (2011) 60% confidence
   Purity Ring's Shrines (277 album plays) is the most-played record of your 2013, and Within and Without is its warmer, hazier neighbour. Nine songs, one mood, and a sequencing (Eyes Be Closed into Echoes into Amor Fati) that argues against shuffle, which you used for 18% of that year.

9. Computer World by Kraftwerk (1981) 55% confidence
   Hot Chip (488), Röyksopp (303), Daft Punk (219), Goldfrapp (375). Computer World is the Kraftwerk album that sounds most like all four, and it is 34 minutes long. The confidence is lower only because 1981 production can sound thin to a listener raised on Hybrid's mixes. Give it two plays.

10. Crooks & Lovers by Mount Kimbie (2010) 50% confidence
    The riskiest, because it is the most fragmentary: 40 minutes of half-songs, field recordings and clipped guitar. But it is the record between SBTRKT (91), Gold Panda (55) and The xx that made the post-dubstep decade you spent your twenties in, and it only works whole.

Albums to play from beginning to end

Twelve records that only make sense in order, grouped by the mood they are for. Three overlap with the list above; the other nine are new here. Turn shuffle off (you used it for 46% of 2020).

Late, with headphones

Slow Sunday

Quiet rooms

Windows down

Artists you have seriously underestimated

Ten artists you gave between three and twenty-five listens and then walked away from, even though the rest of your history says they belong in the front row. Each one is wired to something you played hundreds of times.

Your library has 4,979 artists in it and 54% of your tracks were played exactly once, so most of the thin entries are noise: a compilation you dumped in on 18 May 2010, a playlist you skimmed in a hotel. These ten are different. They sit on direct lines to Hybrid, Röyksopp, Bonobo, Chase & Status, Ólafur Arnalds and Michael Kiwanuka, artists you have between 64 and 733 listens for, and in each case the sampling stopped before the good bit. The counts and dates below are from your own file.

Give these another chance

Ten artists with one or two listens in seventeen years. In each case the day you sampled them tells its own story, and the case for going back is stronger than the case for whatever you played instead.

1,980 of your artists have exactly one listen and another 698 have two. Most of them deserve it. These ten do not. Several of them arrived on days when you were clearly sampling in bulk (18 May 2010, 24 January 2011, 13 August 2023, 27 July 2026) and got lost in the pile.

The second-chance playlist

Twenty tracks from artists you sampled between one and five times and never explored. The date you tried them is on each one, because in most cases the date explains why it did not stick.

A pattern shows up when you line these up. Three of them come from a single afternoon, 27 July 2026, when you sampled six new artists in a row. Two are from 6 December 2013 and 24 January 2011, both days when you were adding a lot at once. One artist was sampled two years before they wrote their best song. None of them got a second listen on a quiet evening, which is what this playlist is for. Roughly 80 minutes.

1. Apricots Bicep, 2021. Sampled 1 to 15 Apr 2025, 5 listens, 3 tracksThree Bicep tracks in a fortnight and then silence, in the same spring you were playing Ben Böhmer and Tinlicker. Apricots is the one that turns a Belfast duo into a stadium act, and it is built on the same slow-swelling chords as Elderbrook's Shallow Water (62 plays).
2. Cassius 1999 Cassius, 1999. Sampled 16 Feb to 3 May 2025, 5 listens, 1 trackFive plays of one Cassius track this year says you liked it and did not look further. This is French house from the year Daft Punk (219 listens) were still a rumour, and it is the missing step between Homework and the Justice single you played 128 times.
3. Tears in Your Eyes Nora En Pure, 2018. Sampled 9 Feb 2016 to 2 Aug 2017, 3 listens, 2 tracksYou played her remix of Klingande's Jubel once and two of her own tracks twice. She was released this one after your last play, so it is definitely new to you, and it is Klangkarussell's Sonnentanz (427 listens) with a grand piano instead of a saxophone.
4. Something About You Hayden James, 2015. Sampled 22 and 23 Jul 2013, 3 listens, 1 trackThree plays of one early track in July 2013, two years before he wrote this. Something About You is Australian house with a soul vocal, the sound RÜFÜS DU SOL (81 listens) and Flight Facilities (209) made your default, and it came out after you stopped checking.
5. Release the Pressure Leftfield, 1995. Sampled 27 Aug 2012 to 9 Sep 2013, 3 listens, 1 trackOne track from a Leftfield compilation, three times. You have 301 Prodigy listens and 28 for Orbital; Leftism is the third pillar of that 1990s British dance canon and you have never heard its opening track, a dub-reggae sermon that becomes a rave.
6. You Wish Nightmares On Wax, 2002. Sampled 1 Jan to 6 Mar 2026, 3 listens, 1 trackThree plays of one track since New Year's Day. Mr. Scruff's Get A Move On! has 54 plays and Bonobo 120; Nightmares On Wax is the Leeds original both of them grew up on, and You Wish is the warmest thing he ever made.
7. Anthem Emancipator, 2006. Sampled 27 Jul to 9 Aug 2026, 3 listens, 1 trackSampled a month ago alongside Quantic and Overmono. Emancipator's first album is the American answer to Bonobo's Animal Magic (which you have played 14 tracks of), and Anthem, with its violin over slow breaks, is the reason people still talk about it.
8. Vanille fraise L'Impératrice, 2018. Sampled 27 Jul to 9 Aug 2026, 4 listens, 2 tracksFour plays in a fortnight this summer, two tracks. They are the French disco band that Parcels (6 listens) and Jungle (587) share a dancefloor with, and Vanille fraise is the track that made them, all Rhodes piano and whispered chorus.
9. Time Is the Enemy Quantic, 2001. Sampled 27 Jul to 9 Aug 2026, 3 listens, 1 trackThree plays of one track in the same July batch. Quantic's first record is the funk-sampling downtempo that Jungle and Mr. Scruff both come from, and this is the song from it that DJs still open sets with.
10. Dopamine Franc Moody, 2018. Sampled 27 Jul to 9 Aug 2026, 3 listens, 1 trackAlso from the July 2026 batch. Franc Moody are London funk in the Jungle mould: falsetto, disco bass, no irony. Dopamine is the one that will tell you in ninety seconds whether the rest of the catalogue is for you. It is.
11. Andromeda Weyes Blood, 2019. Sampled 15 Mar to 6 Sep 2018, 5 listens, 1 trackFive plays of one track in 2018, then the album that made her came out the following year and you never heard it. Andromeda is Lana Del Rey (306 listens) slowed to the pace of a 1970s Laurel Canyon record, and it is the best song on the best album of that year.
12. Shelter Porter Robinson & Madeon, 2016. Madeon sampled 2013 to 2015 (4 listens), Porter Robinson once on 11 Sep 2015You tried both producers separately before they made this together. Shelter is the song that invented the emotional future bass that DROELOE (310 listens, your top artist of 2024) built a career on. If you like The Art Of Change, this is its parent.
13. Say That Toro y Moi, 2013. Sampled once, 10 Apr 2014One play in April 2014, the month Faul & Wad's Changes arrived in your life. Toro y Moi's Anything in Return is house music made by a bedroom indie kid, which is also a fair description of Chet Faker (59 listens) and Little Dragon (71). Say That is the entry point.
14. One Out of Two Breakbot, 2012. Sampled once, 8 Dec 2015Kavinsky has 75 listens in your history and Justice 138; Breakbot is their Ed Banger labelmate who kept the disco and dropped the distortion. One Out of Two, with Irfane singing, is Daft Punk's Get Lucky (125 plays) a year early.
15. Hate or Glory Gesaffelstein, 2013. Sampled once, 6 Dec 20136 December 2013 was a real discovery day: first plays of Jungle, Vance Joy and Tove Lo, all of whom became fixtures. Gesaffelstein got one play. He is the dark end of the French scene that gave you Justice and Kavinsky, and Hate or Glory is a techno track with the swagger of a Prodigy single.
16. Night Air Jamie Woon, 2010. Sampled once, 4 Nov 2015One play in November 2015. Night Air is a 2010 record co-produced by Burial, and it is the bridge between The xx's Intro (128 plays) and SBTRKT's Pharaohs (47). If you liked the idea of post-dubstep but only heard the hits, this is the song you were meant to find.
17. French Navy Camera Obscura, 2009. Sampled 11 Aug 2011 to 20 Aug 2012, 4 listens, 1 trackFour plays of one song in the era when Architecture In Helsinki (293 listens) and Belle and Sebastian (one play) were around. Camera Obscura are Glasgow's other great twee band, and French Navy is a Motown single with a Scottish accent.
18. Home Is Where the Hatred Is Gil Scott-Heron, 1971. Sampled twice, both on 19 Aug 2014, 1 trackTwo plays of one Gil Scott-Heron track in August 2014, the same day you first tried Eric Prydz. Given Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up (49 plays in 2021 to 2024) and Bill Withers' Lovely Day (69), you were always going to like the third voice of that era; this is his most direct song.
19. Gnossienne No. 1 Erik Satie, 1890. Sampled 24 Jan 2011 to 3 Mar 2017, 3 listensIn 2016 you played Henrik Janson's guitar arrangement of Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 31 times. Satie himself has three plays in seventeen years. Start with the first Gnossienne, then any recording of the Gymnopédies on piano rather than guitar.
20. Anthemic Magnetic Man, 2010. Sampled 21 Oct 2010 to 5 Aug 2011, 3 listens, 3 tracksThree tracks in the year Magnetic Man were the biggest thing in British dance music, and then never again. This is Skream, Benga and Artwork doing dubstep as pop, one step before Chase & Status (598 listens) and Rudimental (526) took the same idea to number one.

One artist, the whole catalogue

The artist is Chase & Status. You have 598 listens over fifteen years, they are your seventh most played act of all time, and 579 of those listens are six songs.

The shortlist was long: Silver Swans (376 listens, five tracks, but the catalogue is one album), Adrian Lux (530 listens, 525 of them Teenage Crime, and again not much else to find), Klangkarussell (427, ten tracks), Robin Schulz (305, seven), Michael Kiwanuka (124, eight), ODESZA (126, ten). Chase & Status win for three reasons. First, breadth: they are one of only three artists who appear in five of your eight eras, alongside Avicii and Calvin Harris, first played 28 February 2011 and last played 30 December 2025. Second, depth: the catalogue is seven albums across sixteen years, and the file says you have played six of the fourteen tracks on No More Idols, six of the twelve on Brand New Machine and one on Tribe, most of them once. Third, connective tissue: their featured singers are already in your library. Plan B (89 listens), Tinie Tempah (56), Stormzy (50), Jacob Banks (31), CeeLo Green (92), Dizzee Rascal (19), Blossoms (19), Emeli Sandé (15), White Lies (8), Tom Grennan (7), Seinabo Sey (7), Becky Hill (6). You have been listening to their guest list for years without noticing who was hosting.

What you already know. Lost & Not Found (170 plays, and one of your rare second-life songs: 115 plays, silence from October 2016 to October 2020, then 55 more), Alive (155 across two versions, Jacob Banks singing), Blind Faith (129 across three releases, Liam Bailey), End Credits (64, Plan B), All Goes Wrong (55, Tom Grennan), Count On Me (6, Moko). Plus three plays each of No Problem and Time. That is the whole of it.

Deep cuts from artists you already play

Twenty songs by artists in your all-time top 60, none of which appears among that artist's most played tracks in your history. Each note says what you did play, so you can hear the gap.

The pattern across your top 60 is consistent: one or two songs carry most of the weight. Adrian Lux is the extreme (525 of 530 listens are one song), but Silver Swans (367 of 376), Klangkarussell (413 of 427 across three versions of Sonnentanz), The Wombats (201 of 289) and Minuit (358 of 388) are close behind. This list goes to the album, the neighbouring single or the missing record for twenty of those artists.

1. Silhouettes Avicii, 2012Your Avicii listening is Addicted To You (281), Levels (272), Wake Me Up (236), Liar Liar (174) and You Make Me (145). Silhouettes came out between Levels and True, has the same piano-and-brass lift, and is not among the 64 Avicii tracks that show up in your top plays.
2. I'll Be Waiting Adele, 2011You played the album 19 a total of 866 times, all 22 tracks of it including the live bonuses, and Rolling In The Deep 114 times. But 21 itself has 12 plays across three tracks in your file. I'll Be Waiting is the brass-driven soul stomp from that album that never got a single release.
3. Sit Next to Me Foster The People, 2017Torches has 954 plays and every one of its tracks appears in your history; Supermodel has 31. The third album, Sacred Hearts Club, has none, and Sit Next to Me is the slow, glowing groove that fans of Houdini (97 plays) and Helena Beat (104) took years to notice.
4. I'm Not Alone Calvin Harris, 2009You have 897 Calvin Harris listens, from Acceptable in the 80's (23) through Feel So Close (178) to Giant (77), but the 2009 album Ready for the Weekend is absent. I'm Not Alone is where the shift from novelty electro to trance-sized choruses happened.
5. Bliss Muse, 2001Supermassive Black Hole 136, Hysteria 133, Feeling Good 130, and the whole of The Resistance (250 plays) and Black Holes (214). Origin of Symmetry does not appear in your albums at all. Bliss is the arpeggiated synth song that shows where Starlight (67 plays) came from.
6. True to Form Hybrid, 200392 distinct Hybrid tracks, 733 listens, Disappear Here 399 plays and Wide Angle 251: you know this band better than almost anyone. Except Morning Sci-Fi, their second album, which does not appear in your file. True to Form, with Adam Taylor's vocal, is its centrepiece.
7. Free Florence + The Machine, 202273 distinct Florence tracks, but all from Lungs, Ceremonials, How Big and High As Hope. Dance Fever is missing. Free is the closest she has come to Dog Days Are Over (185 plays across two editions) since Dog Days Are Over.
8. Boy Adrian Lux, 2010525 of your 530 Adrian Lux listens are Teenage Crime, including 222 in a row on 28 May 2012 in Singapore. Boy, with Rebecca & Fiona, is the other single from the same year and album, and it is the same trick: a shy vocal over an enormous, patient build.
9. Boy From School Hot Chip, 2006Over And Over has 184 plays and is the only track from The Warning in your file. Boy From School is the song that sits next to it on the record: the same band, the same year, but sad instead of silly, and the template for everything The xx did three years later.
10. Anything Could Happen Ellie Goulding, 2012433 listens, four eras, Your Song 122 times, Burn 119 across two versions. Halcyon itself has seven plays and one track (Explosions). Anything Could Happen is the single from it, and it is the most Ellie Goulding song she has made.
11. DNA Empire Of The Sun, 2013Walking On A Dream 203, We Are The People 102, Standing On The Shore 82 (a song you have kept for twelve years). Ice On The Dune, the second album, has exactly one play in your history. DNA is its best track and the closest thing to a sequel to Walking On A Dream.
12. Sunset The xx, 2012xx has 266 plays; Coexist 74, all of them Chained (47), Angels (20), Fiction (6) and Tides (1). Sunset is the track on Coexist where Jamie xx's steel drums arrive, and it points directly at the 70 Jamie xx listens you have since accumulated.
13. Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare Matt and Kim, 2009Lightning has 230 plays and Sidewalks 78. Grand has 17, every one of them Daylight. Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare is the other half of Grand's reputation, a two-chord shout-along that your I Said (46) and Let's Go (42) habit was always going to like.
14. Strawberry Swing Coldplay, 2008Magic 87, Paradise 77, Miracles 40, Viva La Vida 23; the Viva La Vida album has just three tracks in your history. Strawberry Swing is the one on it that sounds like Jungle before Jungle existed, and it was later covered by Frank Ocean for good reason.
15. West Coast Lana Del Rey, 2014Video Games 87 (a song you have played across thirteen years), Born To Die 56, Diet Mountain Dew 49, Carmen 48. Ultraviolence has five plays, all of the title track. West Coast is the slow-fast-slow single from it, and it is the record where she stopped being a meme.
16. Running to the Sea Röyksopp, 2013So Easy 102, Happy Up Here 106 across two releases, and 14 tracks from the live album Röyksopp's Night Out. The Inevitable End is not in your file. Running to the Sea, with Susanne Sundfør, is the most dramatic thing they have made and a direct descendant of What Else Is There?, whose live version you played 18 times.
17. Nasty The Prodigy, 2015Firestarter 88, Omen 71 across two versions, and the whole of Invaders Must Die (16 tracks). The Day Is My Enemy is the one album missing, and Nasty is its Firestarter: two and a half minutes of pure aggression, no build, no chorus to speak of.
18. Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves) The Wombats, 2010Techno Fan has 201 plays over fourteen years. This Modern Glitch has 202 plays in total, meaning the other ten tracks share one play between them. Tokyo is the track before Techno Fan on the same record, with the same synths and a bigger chorus.
19. Secrets OneRepublic, 2009Counting Stars 112, Good Life 76. Waking Up shows 76 plays and Good Life accounts for every one of them. Secrets, the cello-led single from the same album, is the song that fans of Sleeping At Last's 500 Miles (122 plays) were built to love.
20. Digital Love Daft Punk, 2001Get Lucky 177 across two editions, then a long tail. Discovery has nine plays in your file, all of them One More Time. Digital Love is the track after it: a Supertramp sample, a guitar solo played on a keyboard, and the blueprint for Justice, Breakbot and half your 2013.

Neglected albums by artists you love, ranked by confidence

Twelve albums by artists in your all-time top 100 that do not appear anywhere in your album history (the file only lists albums with three or more plays, so these have had at most two). Ranked by how sure I am you will like them.

The method: take each top-100 artist, list the albums you have played, look for the missing one, and score it against what you did play. Two things push confidence up: you played the albums either side of the gap (Hybrid, Goldfrapp), or you already love a song from the missing album in a different version (Röyksopp, Hot Chip). Two things push it down: the album is a change of style (Lana Del Rey), or it arrived during your quiet 2015 to 2017 stretch when almost nothing new stuck (Miike Snow, The Avalanches).

Chase & Status' More Than Alot would sit at number four here (80%) but it has its own stage in section 17. Bombay Bicycle Club's Flaws (70%) and Biffy Clyro's Opposites (70%, the album released four months before you stopped playing them in May 2013) were next in line.

B-sides, deep cuts and overlooked tracks

Twenty-five songs by artists you have given at least ten listens: the original of a remix you love, a B-side that outgrew its single, the opening track of an album you only know one song from. Nothing here repeats section 18.

These are chosen from the middle of your library rather than the top: artists between 10 and 300 listens, where the pattern of one song carrying an artist is strongest. Klangkarussell, Labrinth, Digitalism, Bonobo and Faul & Wad each have over 85% of their plays on a single track. In most cases the neighbouring track on the same record is as good and has never been played.

1. Begin Again Purity Ring, 2015Shrines has 277 plays and you played all eleven of its tracks. Another Eternity has none. Begin Again is the single, and it trades the gothic edges for something closer to the Klangkarussell radio edits you were living on that year.
2. Express Yourself Labrinth, 2012Beneath Your Beautiful has 171 plays over thirteen years; Electronic Earth has 175, so the album is essentially that one song. Express Yourself is the Charles Wright cover on the same record, two minutes of brass and shouting.
3. Unconditional Nick Mulvey, 2017Wake Up Now has 55 plays across three tracks, 50 of them Imogen. Unconditional is the album's first single and the one that sounds most like In Your Hands (143 plays).
4. Genghis Khan Miike Snow, 2016Black & Blue 61, Paddling Out 56, Animal 99 across the original and the Mark Ronson remix. Genghis Khan is from the third album you never played, and the song is a falsetto disco tantrum that would have sat happily on your 2013 playlists.
5. Leave The World Behind Swedish House Mafia, 2009Save The World 62, One 56 across two edits, Don't You Worry Child 42, Greyhound 70. Leave The World Behind, with Laidback Luke and Deborah Cox, is the record from before they were a band, and it is the better version of Save The World.
6. Teach Me Bakermat, 2015One Day (Vandaag) has 195 plays across eleven years, one of your genuinely enduring songs. Baianá has 21. Teach Me, from 2015, is the third Bakermat single and it puts a gospel choir where the saxophone used to be.
7. Protection Massive Attack, 1994Teardrop 87, Paradise Circus 38 across two versions, Unfinished Sympathy 18 across three. The album Protection is missing, and its title track, with Tracey Thorn, is the slowest and most patient thing they ever released.
8. The Rip Portishead, 200822 plays of one track from the Roseland live album, 15 across three tracks of Dummy. Third, their 2008 return, is not in your file. The Rip starts as a folk song and ends as a Kraftwerk record, and Radiohead covered it on tour.
9. Flutes Hot Chip, 2012 (original version)You have played the Sasha remix 135 times. The original, on In Our Heads, is nearly nine minutes and gets somewhere the remix does not: a second half where the whole track dissolves into a chant. Hearing the source of a remix you love is its own kind of deep cut.
10. Casio Jungle, 2018Julia 281, Busy Earnin' 139 across two releases, Time 87; the debut has 536 plays. For Ever, the second album, has 7 plays across three tracks. Casio is the one on it that sounds most like the first record, with a bassline that is almost Bakermat.
11. Magnets Disclosure, 2015Settle has 53 plays across six tracks and You & Me in the Flume remix was one of your most played songs of the last year (40). Caracal is missing, and Magnets features Lorde, whom you have played 149 times.
12. Kiara Bonobo, 2010Black Sands has 25 plays and 23 of them are Kong. Kiara is the track before Kong on the same album, a string sample looped until it becomes a beat, and it is the Bonobo song other producers name first.
13. Turnmills Maribou State, 2018Portraits (73 plays, six tracks), Midas 38, Steal 27, All I Need 34. Kingdoms In Colour has four plays across Nervous Tics and Vale. Turnmills, named after the London club, is the album's centrepiece and its most Portraits-like moment.
14. Bloom ODESZA, 2014A Moment Apart has 74 plays and was your third most played track of the last twelve months. In Return, the album before, has two plays total. Bloom is its opener, and it is the record where the Say My Name sound (35 plays) was invented.
15. Floating Parade Michael Kiwanuka, 2024Light 69, Love & Hate 38, one play each of a handful of others. Small Changes, the 2024 album, is not in your file. Floating Parade is its lead single and the closest he has come to Light since Light.
16. This Woman's Work Kate Bush, 1989Cloudbusting 39 plays in 2021, two tracks from Hounds Of Love, two from The Kick Inside. The Sensual World is missing, and This Woman's Work is the piano ballad on it that every singer since has tried and failed to cover.
17. Silver Springs Fleetwood Mac, 1977 (B-side)Six Rumours tracks and one from Tango In The Night. Silver Springs was cut from Rumours and released as the B-side of Go Your Own Way; it is the best song they left off an album, and it only became famous twenty years later.
18. Crosseyed and Painless Talking Heads, 198029 listens, but only two tracks: one from a greatest hits, one from Speaking in Tongues. Remain in Light has nothing. Crosseyed and Painless is the polyrhythmic funk track on it that LCD Soundsystem (29 listens) built a career on.
19. Love Letters Metronomy, 2014The English Riviera has 79 plays across six tracks, The Bay 53 of them. The Love Letters album has none. The title track is a Motown pastiche recorded in mono at Toe Rag, and it is the happiest three minutes they have made.
20. Treat You Better RÜFÜS DU SOL, 2018You Were Right has 54 plays and its own second life (27 before a five-year gap, 26 after). SOLACE has four plays across two tracks. Treat You Better is the album's best song and closest in tempo to the Elderbrook material you play now.
21. Pogo Digitalism, 2007Encore has 83 plays; I Love You, Dude has 89, so it is one song. Idealism, the first album, is missing, and Pogo is its single: indie disco from Hamburg that the Justice single you played 128 times was answering.
22. Netzwerk (Falls Like Rain) Klangkarussell, 2014Sonnentanz accounts for 413 of your 427 Klangkarussell listens. The album Netzwerk has 50 plays and 49 of them are Sonnentanz. The title track is what the duo sound like when they are not playing the hit: same saxophone warmth, sung chorus, half the tempo.
23. White Keys Chilly Gonzales, 2012Solo Piano has 157 plays and Basmati 138, most of them at alarm time. Solo Piano II, from 2012, has none. White Keys is exactly what its title promises, and it is the calmer record for the mornings when Basmati feels too eager.
24. Outro M83, 2011We Own The Sky 86 across two releases, Midnight City 21. Of Hurry Up, We're Dreaming you have played Midnight City, Intro, Reunion and Wait once. Outro is the closing track, four minutes of strings and one line of lyric, and it is the reason the album is on so many end-of-decade lists.
25. Awake Tycho, 2014Dive has 82 plays across two editions, A Walk 52 of them, and Coastal Brake 38. Awake, the follow-up, is absent. The title track puts live drums under the same shimmer and is the closest Tycho gets to a rock song.

Twenty songs from before you joined Spotify

Your history starts on 24 March 2009. These twenty songs were released before that date, fit your taste unusually well, and belong to artists who do not appear anywhere in your 4,979. Each one names the modern anchor in your library that it explains.

A few facts frame this. You have never played Four Tet, Kraftwerk, Boards of Canada, Tricky, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, Steely Dan, Roy Ayers or Beth Orton. You have played 120 Bonobo tracks, 153 Massive Attack, 283 Purity Ring, 733 Hybrid and 587 Jungle. The list below is the set of records that sit directly upstream of those five, spread across five decades from 1968 to 2003, and it is deliberately weighted to the 1990s, where your existing 1990s listening (Prodigy, DJ Shadow, Massive Attack, Oasis) turns out to have left the most gaps.

1. Bonnie and Clyde 1968, with Brigitte BardotYou have 19 Carla Bruni listens, 43 plays of Daniela Andrade's La Vie En Rose, and a June 2023 spell of French café singers. Gainsbourg is where French pop's cool comes from, and this duet is the most sampled thing he made.
2. Walk On By 1969Hooverphonic, whom you have played 18 times since August 2020, built their song 2Wicky on this twelve-minute Bacharach cover. So is half of the Portishead and Massive Attack you played in 2010 and 2011. The original is longer, slower and stranger than any of them.
3. Everybody Loves the Sunshine 1976Jungle (587 listens) and Maribou State (117) both learned their warmth from this record. A vibraphone, a chorus of one line, and a synth that sounds like heat. You have never played Roy Ayers; this is the one-song proof of concept.
4. Use Me 1972Lovely Day has 82 plays in your history and Ain't No Sunshine three. Use Me is the funky one: a clavinet riff, a rhythm section that never hurries, and a lyric that is funnier than either of the songs you know.
5. Trans-Europe Express 1977Hybrid, Röyksopp, Hot Chip and Goldfrapp all trace back here and you have never played Kraftwerk. Trans-Europe Express is the seven-minute train ride that gave dance music its pulse; Hot Chip's Over And Over (184 plays) is a direct descendant.
6. Tinseltown in the Rain 1984London Grammar (245 listens) and The xx (374) are the modern versions of this: three Glaswegians, a drum machine, and a song about a city at night. Nothing in your 1980s listening prepares you for how good this is.
7. Ghosts 1982The xx's Intro (128 plays) and Islands (122) share this record's DNA: space, restraint, a voice that barely rises. Ghosts is a number five single in Britain with no drums for most of its length. Talk Talk, whom you sampled twice, came out of the same scene.
8. Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops 1984Purity Ring (283 listens), Mazzy Star's Into Dust (55 plays since 2010) and your one Beach House listen all point back to the Cocteau Twins, whom you have never played. Elizabeth Fraser's voice is the sound Purity Ring were trying to make with a computer.
9. Hell Is Round the Corner 1995Same Isaac Hayes sample as Portishead's Glory Box, released the same year, from the third member of the Bristol scene you know through Massive Attack (153 listens). Tricky has never appeared in your history. This is the one to fix that.
10. Alison 1993Into Dust by Mazzy Star has 55 plays and came back after seven years; Cigarettes After Sex have 21. Slowdive were making the same slow, drowned guitar music in Reading in 1993 and you have never played them. Alison is the song.
11. She Cries Your Name 1996The Chemical Brothers' vocalist on their quietest songs, the folk singer on Zero 7's records, and never in your library. She Cries Your Name is a folk song with a string arrangement and a drum loop, the exact recipe London Grammar and Nick Mulvey (243 listens) use now.
12. Bug Powder Dust - K&D Session 1998Sofa Surfers were among the first artists you ever played, on 24 March 2009, and their Sofa Rockers in Richard Dorfmeister's remix got eight plays that year. Kruder & Dorfmeister's K&D Sessions is the album of Dorfmeister remixes that defined Vienna downtempo, and you never went back to it.
13. The Gift 1996Hybrid's Wide Angle (251 plays) and Finished Symphony (25) came out of the Bristol progressive breaks scene that Way Out West started. The Gift, with Joanna Law's vocal, is that scene's first anthem, and neither Way Out West nor Sasha (three plays) survived your 2010 sampling.
14. Flaming June 1997Paul Oakenfold's Vexille soundtrack has 320 plays in your history and BT is the American producer Oakenfold championed above all others in 1997. Flaming June is the trance record that Hybrid (733 listens) were reacting against and borrowing from at the same time.
15. Roygbiv 1998Tycho (110 listens), Gold Panda (55) and DROELOE (310) all descend from this two-and-a-half-minute track: a warm bass, a detuned melody, tape hiss as an instrument. Boards of Canada have never been played in your history, which is the biggest single gap in your electronic listening.
16. She Moves She 2003Four Tet is absent from your 4,979 artists, which is remarkable given 120 Bonobo listens, 17 for Caribou and 70 for Jamie xx. She Moves She is the folk-sample-and-breakbeat track from Rounds that all three of those artists cite.
17. Breathe 2001Röyksopp's Melody AM (112 plays), Zero 7 (55 listens) and Air (12) were your 2010 downtempo. Télépopmusik's Breathe, with Angela McCluskey, was the fourth record in that set on everyone else's shelf and is missing from yours.
18. Lady (Hear Me Tonight) 2000Daft Punk have 219 listens and Stardust one (16 February 2023). Modjo's Lady is the third great French filter-house single, built on a Chic sample, and it is what Get Lucky (177 plays) was remembering.
19. Girls 2002Hybrid fans in 2002 also owned Scorpio Rising by Death In Vegas, and Girls is its centrepiece: a My Bloody Valentine wall of guitar over a breakbeat, later used in Lost in Translation. Nobody in your history covers this ground, which is why it is here.
20. Intro 2000You played Gossip's Heavy Cross in Fred Falke's remix once, and Kavinsky (75 listens) and Justice (138) are the next generation of this Paris sound. Intro, by Braxe and Falke, is the French-touch record every producer of your 2013 favourites learned from.

The decade you have not explored enough

The 1970s. Not the 1990s, which is the obvious guess, because the 1990s turn out to be reasonably well covered. The 1970s is where your 2024 to 2026 taste comes from and where you have only just started digging.

The case against the 1990s first. Your history holds The Prodigy at 301 listens, DJ Shadow at 312 (Endtroducing, 1996), Massive Attack at 153, Moloko at 81, Oasis at 68, Mazzy Star at 63, Radiohead at 52, The Verve at 45, Faithless at 40, Basement Jaxx at 38 and Portishead at 37, plus Hybrid's Wide Angle from 1999 with 251 plays. That is eleven 1990s artists over 30 listens and a genuine working knowledge of the decade's British dance music.

Now the 1970s. Bill Withers 86 (almost all Lovely Day), Curtis Mayfield 69 (almost all Move On Up), Kate Bush 64 (but 51 of those are Hounds Of Love, which is 1985), Marvin Gaye 34, Fleetwood Mac 32, J.J. Cale 26, Stevie Wonder 20, Joni Mitchell 20, Led Zeppelin 8, Nick Drake 8. Zero for Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Al Green, Roy Ayers, Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, Can, Cymande, Gilberto Gil. And the direction of travel is telling: J.J. Cale was first played on 8 March 2026 and Don't Go To Strangers was one of your most played songs of the last twelve months (25). You are already walking into this decade; you just have not looked around.

The second argument is about what you play now. Jungle (587 listens, four eras), Maribou State (117), Bonobo (120), Barry Can't Swim (63), the Avalanches (195) and Mr. Scruff (57) are sample-based or sample-imitating music, and the records they sample are almost all from 1970 to 1979: Roy Ayers, Shuggie Otis, Bob James, Cymande, Azymuth. Hybrid, Oakenfold and Röyksopp are downstream of Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. Your acoustic side (José González 336, Nick Mulvey 243, Junip 150) is downstream of John Martyn and Nick Drake. The 1970s is the source code for three of your four biggest habits. Twenty songs, none of which you have played, none of which repeat section 21:

1. Strawberry Letter 23 1971The record Jungle's Julia (281 plays) was aiming at: a 17-year-old playing every instrument, a bell-like guitar hook and a falsetto that never strains. It was a hit for the Brothers Johnson six years later, but this is the version.
2. Let's Stay Together 1971Bill Withers has 86 listens in your history and Curtis Mayfield 69; Al Green is the third name in that Memphis and Chicago soul triangle and he is absent. Let's Stay Together is the gentlest number one of the decade.
3. Do It Again 1972J.J. Cale arrived in your life on 8 March 2026 and got 26 listens in four months, with Don't Go To Strangers at 25. Steely Dan are the sardonic, jazz-schooled cousins of that laid-back sound, never played by you. Do It Again has an electric sitar solo and a lyric about gambling.
4. Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma) 1976Bakermat's Baianá (21 plays) and Astrud Gilberto (58 listens) are your Brazilian entries. Jorge Ben is the bridge between them: samba-funk about a footballer, with a groove that Jungle would kill for.
5. Toda Menina Baiana 1979The other side of Brazilian pop from Astrud Gilberto's bossa nova: brighter, faster, with a disco bass. Gilberto Gil is one of the most important musicians of the century and has no plays in your history.
6. Supernature 1977Goldfrapp's Supernature has 210 plays in your file and its title is a tribute to this: a ten-minute French disco track about genetically modified animals, with the synth bass Goldfrapp built Ooh La La (151 plays) around.
7. Oxygène, Pt. 4 1976Paul Oakenfold's Vexille score (320 plays) and Hybrid's Cinematic Soundscape are the grandchildren of Oxygène. Jarre has never been played by you. Part 4 is the single, and its arpeggios are in every progressive breaks record you love.
8. Stratosfear 1976Hybrid's Empire (148 plays) and Finished Symphony (25) are orchestral breaks; Tangerine Dream were the first band to make electronic music that big and that slow. Stratosfear is the accessible one, with a guitar and a harpsichord over the sequencers.
9. Breathe (In the Air) 1973Muse have 846 listens in your history and Pink Floyd none, which is a strange pair of facts. Breathe is the first song proper on The Dark Side of the Moon and the reason every Muse album has a slow one with a lap-steel guitar.
10. The Logical Song 1979Daft Punk's Digital Love, recommended in section 18, is built on a Supertramp sample. The Logical Song is their best single: a Wurlitzer, a saxophone and a lyric about being told what to think. Gorillaz fans (40 listens) will hear where Damon Albarn got the mood.
11. I'm Not in Love 1975Air (12 listens), Zero 7 (55) and Röyksopp (303) all owe their choral pads to this record: 256 overdubbed voices used as a keyboard. It is the most sophisticated song ever to reach number one in Britain and you have never played it.
12. Solid Air 1973José González (336 listens), Junip (150), Nick Mulvey (243) and Fink (28): your acoustic guitarists all sit downstream of John Martyn, who ran his guitar through an Echoplex and sang like a saxophone. Solid Air, written for Nick Drake (eight listens), is the way in.
13. Les Fleurs 1970A Rotary Connection singer produced by Charles Stepney: strings, choir, and a two-and-a-half minute build that Jungle and Maribou State (117 listens) would both recognise as their own. It became famous forty years late, via film trailers and 4hero.
14. Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001) 1973Mr. Scruff's Get A Move On! has 54 plays in your history, and the funk-jazz crate it came from starts here: a nine-minute Rhodes-piano version of the Strauss fanfare with a wah guitar. Bonobo fans should hear it once.
15. Bra 1972A British-Caribbean funk band from Brixton whose records were sampled by De La Soul, The Fugees and, indirectly, everyone on the Avalanches' Since I Left You (113 plays). Bra is the one with the bassline you will already know without knowing why.
16. Nautilus 1974The most sampled jazz record of the decade, used by Run-DMC, Ghostface Killah and dozens more, from the crate DJ Shadow (312 listens) built Endtroducing out of. Three minutes of Fender Rhodes, a bass riff and a horn stab.
17. Expansions 1975Cosmic jazz-funk: a Rhodes, a flute and a bassline that Bonobo (120 listens) has been rewriting for twenty-five years. Expansions is the one that gets played at every festival sunrise.
18. Vitamin C 1972Radiohead (52 listens) and Hot Chip (488) both name Can as the reason they exist: a Cologne band with a Japanese street singer and a drummer who played like a machine. Vitamin C is two and a half minutes and the funkiest thing to come out of Germany before Kraftwerk.
19. Jazz Carnival 1979Brazilian jazz-funk with a synth bass, the sound Bakermat sampled for Baianá (21 plays) and Jungle borrowed for Busy Earnin' (139). Jazz Carnival is nine minutes and was a British club hit in 1980, which explains why it sounds like something Maribou State would make.
20. Lowdown 1976Keli Holiday has a track called lowdown in your history (two plays). This is the other one: California disco-soul with a bassline that Daft Punk and Breakbot would later dismantle. J.J. Cale fans usually get here within a year.

Backwards through music history

Five artists you love, each traced back three generations to the records they were listening to, and the records those people were listening to. Where you have already sampled a link in the chain, the count is given; where you have not, the record is the recommendation.

The rule for each chain is that every step has to be a real influence, not a resemblance. Jungle have said Roy Ayers and Sly Stone; The xx have said Young Marble Giants and Everything But The Girl; Avicii built Levels on a Swedish house lineage that runs straight back to Moroder. The result is five short reading lists that end, in most cases, in a decade you have barely played.

Jungle 587 listens, Julia 281 of them, 72 in one day on 21 October 2014

The xx 374 listens, Intro 128, Islands 122, first played 28 July 2011

Avicii 1,427 listens, your most played artist, 123 plays of Wake Me Up on 22 August 2013

Adele 1,105 listens, 399 of them on 18 June 2011, the album 19 played 866 times

Hybrid 733 listens, first played 14 May 2010, your first obsession

Forwards from 2010

Your twelve favourites of 2010 were Hybrid, Goldfrapp, The Prodigy, David Guetta, Plan B, Nitin Sawhney, Basement Jaxx, Katie Melua, Lena, Ellie Goulding, Massive Attack and Röyksopp. For each, one artist active mainly since 2018 who does the same job now, and who is absent from your history.

The test for each pairing was function rather than sound: what did the 2010 artist do for you, and who does that now? Guetta was spectacle, Katie Melua was jazz for the car, Plan B was soul with a chip on its shoulder. Every successor below has zero plays in your 4,979 artists (one appears once as a featured guest on someone else's song, which is noted).

What 2010 Christian would obsess over now

Fifteen tracks released between 2020 and 2026, chosen purely for the ears you had in 2010: breaks, progressive house, electro-pop and big trip-hop. None of these artists appears anywhere in your history.

2010 you had 1,234 listens, a 23% skip rate, and a top twelve that was 60% electronic. You played Hybrid 239 times, Goldfrapp 138, The Prodigy 134, and your biggest single day was 18 May, when you tried 275 songs in one sitting. That person wanted drama, a drop, and a singer who sounded like they meant it. This playlist is built for him, from records he could not have heard.

1. Holiday Confidence Man, 2022Goldfrapp's Ooh La La (151 plays) was your idea of a pop single in 2010. This is that record made by Australians who have watched too much 1990s MTV, and it is impossible to dislike.
2. Forbidden Feelingz Nia Archives, 2022In 2010 you played The Prodigy 134 times and Chase & Status were about to arrive. This is jungle as a two-and-a-half-minute pop song, sung by the producer, and 2010 you would have played it 50 times in a week.
3. I Saw Young Fathers, 2023Massive Attack was in your top twelve in 2010 (Teardrop 78 plays before its gap). I Saw is trip-hop's grandchild: a marching drum, a gospel shout and a wall of distortion, and it is the loudest thing on this list.
4. Baby, We're Ascending HAAi with Jon Hopkins, 2022Hybrid's Empire (148 plays) taught 2010 you that a breakbeat could be euphoric and sad at once. This is that feeling with Jon Hopkins on the keys, and it is the closest anyone has come to a new Hybrid record.
5. Corner of My Sky Kelly Lee Owens with John Cale, 2020Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain (29 plays) and Röyksopp's Melody AM were your quiet electronica. Kelly Lee Owens is Welsh techno with a Velvet Underground founder reciting poetry over it, and it belongs on the same shelf.
6. Eternity Anyma with Chris Avantgarde, 2023David Guetta's Love Is Gone (13 plays, your top Guetta track of 2010) was your big-room moment. Eternity is the 2020s equivalent: melodic techno with a huge vocal hook and a drop built for stadiums. 2010 you would not have resisted.
7. Hallucination Regard with Years & Years, 2022Ellie Goulding (13 plays in 2010, 433 since) and Guetta in one record: a pop voice over a slinky house groove, made by a Kosovan producer who learned everything from 2010 radio.
8. If U Need It Sammy Virji, 2023Basement Jaxx's Good Luck (five plays in 2009) was your first taste of British party house. If U Need It is UK garage's return, all shuffled drums and a bassline that drops out and back in, and it has the same grin.
9. Scarlett Holly Humberstone, 2021Ellie Goulding's Your Song (122 plays) was the piano ballad you kept. Scarlett is the modern version: a songwriter alone with a synth, singing to a friend, no chorus bigger than the room.
10. Articulation Rival Consoles, 2020Hybrid's Cinematic Soundscape and the Vexille score (320 plays) were your instrumental electronica in 2010 and 2011. Rival Consoles is the London producer making that music now: analogue synths, slow builds, no vocals, film-sized.
11. Vocoder Floating Points, 2021DJ Shadow's Organ Donor (203 plays) and Hybrid's breaks were about texture as much as beat. Vocoder is eight minutes of a single vocal sample being bent into a rave record, and it is what Sasha's Xpander would sound like if it were made in 2021.
12. Baby Four Tet, 2020You had never heard of Four Tet in 2010 and still have not played him. Baby is a chopped Ellie Goulding vocal over a warm garage beat, which is the neatest possible bridge between your 2010 and your 2020s. Yes, that Ellie Goulding.
13. No Time Lastlings, 2020Adrian Lux's Teenage Crime (222 consecutive plays on one day in 2012) was a shy vocal over a huge build. No Time, by an Australian brother-sister duo, is the same shape made for the RÜFÜS DU SOL generation, and it was released on their label.
14. Come Alive Pendulum, 2021Pendulum are the drum and bass band 2010 you somehow missed while playing The Prodigy 134 times; they have never appeared in your history. Come Alive is their comeback single, and it sounds like Invaders Must Die with a bigger budget.
15. Ani Kuni Polo & Pan, 2021Röyksopp's Happy Up Here (80 plays) and Air were your French-adjacent electronica. Polo & Pan are Paris in the 2020s: a children's chant, a disco bass and a chorus that goes round like a carousel. Never played by you.

A playlist for 2026 you, chosen entirely by 2010 you

Fifteen tracks from 2009 to 2011 that the person who played Hybrid 239 times in eight months would insist you hear now. Where an artist is already in your history, the specific track is one your file says you have not played.

The ground rules for 2010 you: Windows XP, 2% shuffle, one enormous day of 275 listens, and a conviction that a good record should take at least a minute to get going. He has read your 2026 file and is mostly pleased (DROELOE, Elderbrook and Model Man are exactly what he hoped for) but he has noticed some things you skipped on the way. Each note is in his voice.

1. Need You Now Cut Copy, 20112010 me: You have played Empire Of The Sun 407 times and never once tried Cut Copy, who are from the same city and were there first. Need You Now takes three minutes to arrive and the last two are the best thing on Zonoscope. Never played by you.
2. Watercolour Pendulum, 20102010 me: I played The Prodigy 134 times this year. Pendulum are the band who took that and added a rock singer, and Watercolour went to number four while I was listening to Hybrid. Sixteen years later you still have not played them. Fix it.
3. Before I Move Off Mount Kimbie, 20102010 me: You will spend 374 plays on The xx. Mount Kimbie made the instrumental version of that record the same year, in the same postcode, and Before I Move Off is a guitar loop and a broken beat that you will recognise instantly. Never played.
4. Angel Echoes Four Tet, 20102010 me: There Is Love in You came out in January and I did not notice because I was busy with Goldfrapp. You have never played Four Tet either, which means we are both wrong. Angel Echoes is a chopped soul voice over a soft kick, and it is the parent of half of what you play now.
5. Go Do Jónsi, 20102010 me: You played Architecture In Helsinki 293 times and Of Monsters and Men 222; you clearly like joyful noise from small countries. Go Do is the Sigur Rós singer making a pop record with flutes and marching drums, and it is the happiest thing 2010 produced. Never played.
6. The Drug Röyksopp, 20102010 me: We both love Röyksopp (303 listens between us) but Senior, the instrumental album from September 2010, is not in your file at all. The Drug is its single: no vocal, a bass that walks, a melody that sounds like fog. It is the Röyksopp record that fits your 2026 listening best.
7. Kiss of Life Friendly Fires, 20092010 me: Every one of your five Friendly Fires plays is from their 2019 album, which means you have never heard the good stuff. Kiss of Life is samba drums and a chorus Foster The People (1,023 plays for you) would have given an arm for.
8. Only Love Way Out West, 20092010 me: Hybrid are the best band in the world and Way Out West are their older cousins from Bristol. We Love Machine came out in 2009 and Only Love is the single: a progressive house record with a real singer and a real chorus. You have never played them. I am genuinely disappointed.
9. Every Other Way BT, 20102010 me: Oakenfold's Vexille soundtrack is on 320 plays and BT is the producer Oakenfold spent the late 1990s championing. These Hopeful Machines came out in February 2010 and Every Other Way, with JES singing, is eight minutes of what trance sounds like when it grows up. Never played.
10. Dance Yrself Clean LCD Soundsystem, 20102010 me: You have 29 LCD Soundsystem listens and none of them are from This Is Happening, which is the one that came out this year. Dance Yrself Clean is three minutes of murmuring and then the loudest synth you will hear all decade. Play it on good speakers.
11. Bloodbuzz Ohio The National, 20102010 me: You played England from High Violet 75 times across two editions and Terrible Love once. Bloodbuzz Ohio is the single from the same album, the one with the piano and the line about owing money to the money, and somehow you never got to it.
12. Stay Close Delorean, 20102010 me: Basque Balearic pop. Subiza came out in June 2010 and Stay Close is the track: a house piano, a choir of one person, and a chorus that goes up when you expect it to go down. You never played Delorean, and Empire Of The Sun fans (407 plays) have no excuse.
13. Rill Rill Sleigh Bells, 20102010 me: Everything else they made is too loud for you, but Rill Rill is a Funkadelic sample and a cheerleader vocal, and it is the sweetest song of 2010 in disguise. Never played. Give it one go with the volume down.
14. All the King's Men Wild Beasts, 20092010 me: Two Dancers is the album Foals fans and Everything Everything fans (24 listens each for you) were arguing about this year. All the King's Men has a falsetto, a baritone, and a bassline that Hot Chip (488 plays) would recognise. You have never played Wild Beasts.
15. Night Air Jamie Woon, 20102010 me: You gave Jamie Woon exactly one listen, on 4 November 2015, and probably not this. Night Air is a 2010 single co-produced by Burial, and it sits directly between The xx's Intro (128 plays for you) and SBTRKT. It is the song 2010 was about, and you missed it.

Your festival

Seventeen years of listening, 4,979 artists, and a habit of playing one song until it gives in. Here is what happens when all of that is handed a field, four stages and a weekend in June.

The festival is called Disappear Here, after the Hybrid album you have played 399 times, which is more than most people play any album. The site is a chalk down above the Dorset coast, chosen because 81% of your listening happens in Britain and because the one thing your history lacks is a sea view. The weekend is Friday 18 to Sunday 20 June 2027. The date is not accidental: 18 June 2011 is the day you played Adele 399 times, your biggest single day of listening on record, and a festival built from your data has to open on its holiest date. Gates open at 06:30, unusually early, because your mornings are when Basmati gets played (91 morning plays) and a festival that ignores that would be lying about who it is for.

The Empire Stage

Friday is a tribute night. Avicii is your most played artist of all time, 1,427 plays across five eras from 2011 to 2024, and the album True (677 plays) is your third most played record. The Friday close is True performed start to finish by a full band and orchestra, the way Stockholm did it, with Wake Me Up saved for last because you once played it 123 times in a single day, 22 August 2013. Saturday belongs to Adele, on the anniversary of the day you played 19 until the sun went down. Sunday closes with Foster The People playing Torches in full, which at 954 plays is your most played album ever and the only sensible way to send 40,000 people home.

The Radio Edit Tent

The tent is where your 2012 to 2015 self lives. The rule about track length is enforced by a compère with a stopwatch, and the crowd is told at the start that if anyone requests an extended mix the lights go up. Adrian Lux plays one song. You know which one. He plays it for as long as the licence allows.

The Solo Piano Stage

Programmed around the shape of your day. You wake to a piano, you work to strings, and 8% of your listening is after midnight, when Model Man and Sophie Zelmani take over. The stage runs from 06:30 each morning and again from 22:00, and is silent in the middle of the day so that the tent can be heard from the ridge.

The Windows XP Shed

The heritage barn. Every act here first appears in your history between 2009 and 2013, and half of them you have not touched in years. The beige tower by the door has 2010's 1,495 Windows plays engraved on a brass plate. Skip rate inside the barn is set to 51%, in tribute to your 2009.

Five acts you have never heard who deserve a slot

Every one of these has zero plays in your history. Each is placed where your own habits say it should go.

Your radio station

A station built to your listening clock: a piano at breakfast, radio edits at lunch, melodic house after dark, and a presenter who has agreed to stay up for the 8% of you that is awake after midnight.

The station is Radio 222, broadcasting on 95.9 FM. The name is for the 222 consecutive plays of Teenage Crime on 28 May 2012, and the frequency is your 95,925 plays with the last three digits knocked off. The station ident is the first four bars of Basmati, obviously. Its personality statement, printed above the studio door: We play what you would have played anyway, then one thing you wouldn't have. We do not play extended mixes before 7pm. We do not play Michael Bublé before 20 December. We do not skip. That last line is a dig. Your overall skip rate is 19.6%, and it hit 40% in 2024.

Radio 222 is a weekday station. 77% of your plays happen Monday to Friday, so the schedule is designed for someone with headphones on at a desk, with a softer weekend edition that leans on the artists who over-index on your Saturdays and Sundays: Adele, BOYY, Olivia Dean, Self Esteem, Maribou State, Miles Davis. Every presenter is invented. None of them exist, which is a shame, because a couple of them would be good.

The shows

A full weekday on Radio 222

Roughly 70% of what follows is drawn from your own history. The rest is new to you, checked against your full artist list, and marked with a badge.

Weekend edition: Basmati Breakfast starts at 08:00, Radio Edits Only is replaced by two hours of Adele and BOYY (both weekend over-indexers), and The Small Hours runs to 01:00 with extra Miles Davis and Maribou State. Sol Maher still does After Midnight. Sol Maher always does After Midnight.

The soundtrack to your life

Fifty songs in twelve chapters, chosen for where you were rather than how often you pressed play. Nineteen of them you played fewer than twenty times. Eleven you have never heard at all. Both kinds are here because a soundtrack is about the scene, and some scenes you under-scored the first time round.

The rule for this list was simple: no chapter gets its most played song by default. Teenage Crime is here because Singapore without it would be dishonest, but Rolling In The Deep (114 plays) is not, because the Adele you actually lived with in June 2011 was the quieter album, 19, at 866 plays. The new songs are placed where they would have fitted had you found them at the time. Play counts are yours; where a track was played fewer than twenty times it is marked as such.

If your taste were a film

Four men who are the same man, a beige computer, one song played 222 times, and a redemption arc that involves a Dutch producer and a piano. It is a comedy, mostly.

The cast

Supporting cast: Olivia Colman as the office manager who owns the Windows XP machine and lends it out; Richard Ayoade as a record shop owner who refuses to stock radio edits; and a cameo for a beige tower PC that gets a round of applause at the premiere.

The soundtrack

1. Empire - Original Hybrid · 148 playsOpening titles, over a slow pan across an office in 2010. The film starts where you did.
2. Nine Million Bicycles Katie Melua · 35 playsThe pre-Hybrid world: small, polite, 336 plays a year. Diegetic, from a desk radio.
3. Beautiful Life Gui Boratto · 185 playsThe 18 May 2010 sequence. A song you found that day and kept for fourteen years, so it gets the moment everything changes.
4. Make You Feel My Love Adele · 58 playsMovement one's centre. Your top Adele track of 2011 and a Dylan song, which the O'Connor character is oblivious to.
5. Aotearoa Minuit · 220 plays, 2011 to 2026The end of movement one, as he packs for Singapore. A New Zealand band's song about home, played from 2011 to 2026.
6. Teenage Crime - Radio Edit Adrian Lux · 525 playsThe 222 sequence. It plays in full once. Then the loop begins and the camera stays on the window.
7. Let Me Know Now Silver Swans · 367 playsAmerican June, 2013. A road, a rental car, and a song that only he remembers. Powell drives.
8. Wake Me Up Avicii · 236 plays, 123 on 22 August 2013The high-water mark of movement two, and the last time the EDM summer version of him is entirely happy.
9. Pi's Lullaby Mychael Danna · 50 playsThe Swiss interlude between movements two and three. A lake, a soundtrack album, 1,890 listens from a country he was only visiting.
10. I Believe in You Rumer · 71 playsMovement three, the kitchen speaker, Andrew Scott not saying much. Played 71 times in 2016 and never before or since.
11. It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas Michael Bublé · 24 plays, a December songThe December scenes, every year, cut together as one long dinner. 179 Bublé plays in the last twelve days of each year demand it.
12. Kings (feat. Fred Wesley) The Apples · 94 playsThe lockdown bridge. A funk band from Tel Aviv, a flat, and a man dancing on his own for the first time since 2013.
13. Basmati Chilly Gonzales · 138 plays, 91 in the morningEvery morning of movement four opens on the same eight bars. By the third time the audience laughs. By the sixth they don't.
14. Foolish Fish DROELOE · 49 plays30 June 2024, the day the skip rate stopped climbing. Mescal on a train to Rotterdam, and the film finally has colour in it.
15. Clarity Model Man · 51 playsClosing credits, 01:00, a man in headphones not pressing anything. The title is doing some work and the film knows it.

If your taste were a city

Ten neighbourhoods, one river, a heritage quarter nobody visits any more and a new dockside development where all the money is going. Population 4,979 artists. The station is in the middle, where it always is.

The city is laid out the way your history is: the oldest districts in the north, up on the hill where Hybrid built the first house; the loud dance strip along the river where you spent 2012 to 2015; the quiet quarters to the east where you retreated afterwards; and the new docks in the south-west, still half scaffolding, where 2024 to 2026 is being built. Every neighbourhood below lists who actually lives there, with your listen counts, what the streets sound like, and how to reach it from the station.

Not shown on the map: the ring road of 8,000-odd songs you played once and never again (54% of all your tracks), which circles the whole city and which you drive along constantly without ever stopping.

Your taste as a fictional universe

Every genre a nation, every obsession a dynasty. The chronicle below runs from the founding of the world on a Tuesday in May 2010 to the frontier towns of 2026, and it is, like all chronicles, mostly about wars.

The known world is a continent with a river through it. North of the river lie the old kingdoms: Breaksland, founded by Hybrid, with its vassal states of Goldfrapp and the Prodigy; and the Big Voice Marches, ruled from Adele's keep. South of the river is the Radio Edit Republic, a loud mercantile federation of Avicii, Calvin Harris and the Swedish House Mafia, whose constitution forbids any song longer than four minutes. To the east, in the forests, are the Indie Cantons: the Kooks, the Wombats, Foster The People and the small hill-tribes of Torches. Further east still, past the mountains, lies the quiet theocracy of Recomposed, where Max Richter and Chilly Gonzales keep the old scores. And south-west, on the coast, are the Docklands, settled only since 2024 and growing faster than anyone can map.

Characters of the realm

The dating profile

Your taste, as it would present itself on an app, with all the honesty an app allows. It has been told to be specific. It has mostly complied.

Prompts

First-date playlist

Eight songs, sequenced for a date that starts with coffee and ends, if it goes well, at about 01:00 with the good headphones. Every one is from your own history; this is a profile, not a recommendation.

1. Sunrise Norah Jones · 42 plays, 2011 to 2025Coffee. A song you have kept for fourteen years without ever playing it to death, which is the version of you a first date should meet.
2. Time Above The Earth The Kooks · 131 playsThe walk. Strings and a Brighton accent. Your top Kooks song and nobody else's, which is a good conversation starter.
3. Busy Earnin' Jungle · 136 plays, your top track in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024Lunch. Four years as your number one Jungle song shows you can commit to something that is also fun.
4. Feel Bombay Bicycle Club · 152 playsThe afternoon. Bollywood strings on a north London indie record: the 2014 song that proves you have range, played 147 times in one year to prove you have focus.
5. Teardrop Elderbrook · 77 playsEarly evening. Your current anthem. Shows you are living in 2026 and not, as the rest of the playlist suggests, in 2013.
6. Sinnerman (Felix Da Housecat's Heavenly House Mix) Nina Simone · 61 plays across releasesDinner. Nina Simone with a kick drum under her. If they ask why the remix and not the original, tell them you have the original 43 times too. Then change the subject.
7. Hometown Glory Adele · 45 playsThe walk home. Not Rolling In The Deep. The quieter one. Do not mention 18 June 2011 unless asked directly.
8. Clarity Model Man · 51 plays, an after-midnight artist01:00. The most over-indexed after-midnight artist in your history. If the date has reached this song it has gone well, and if it hasn't, it is a very good song to be alone with.

The roast

You asked for it, or at least somebody did. What follows is unkind, accurate, and drawn entirely from your own numbers, which is the worst kind of unkind.

Let us start with 28 May 2012, because you would want us to. On that day, in Singapore, you played Teenage Crime by Adrian Lux 222 times in a row. Not 222 times across a day, which would be a cry for help. In a row. That is roughly twelve hours of the same three minutes and twenty seconds, and the thing about Teenage Crime is that it does not have a second half. It has a first half, twice. You knew this by play four. You knew this in Singapore, in a flat, on a Monday, with the whole of Southeast Asia outside the window, and you chose the Radio Edit. Adrian Lux has released other songs. You have played three of them, four times in total.

Then there is 18 June 2011, which the rest of this report treats as a holy day and which we are going to treat as what it was: a grown man playing 19 by Adele 399 times on a Saturday. The album is 43 minutes long. Even allowing for the twelve tracks it holds, you heard Daydreamer something like thirty times. And 19 is not even the sad one. 21 was out. You had access to Someone Like You and you chose to sit in a room with Cold Shoulder (38 plays) and My Same (38 plays) and Melt My Heart to Stone twice over (76 between the studio and live takes), like a man who has heard of heartbreak and wants to try the demo version first.

Your listening has a shape, and the shape is a radio edit. 5.7% of everything you have ever heard has the words Radio Edit in the title. That is not a taste, it is a fear of commitment with a tempo. The one extended mix you have ever taken to heart is Nobody To Love by Sigma, and you played it 74 times as if to prove you could. The rest of your dance music is a series of songs that have had their middles removed by a man at a record label, and you have played them 5,000-odd times without once wondering what was in the middle. There was a breakdown in the middle. There was a whole second drop. You will never know.

54% of the tracks in your history you played exactly once. Fourteen thousand nine hundred and twenty-four songs, and more than eight thousand of them got a single audition and a shrug. Meanwhile 660 tracks account for half of all your listening. You are the friend who says they love trying new restaurants and then orders the same thing at the same place for a decade, except the same place is Let Me Know Now by Silver Swans, a song by a San Francisco duo that nobody, and we have checked, nobody else remembers. 367 plays. Your discovery of 2013, over Avicii, over Klangkarussell, over Daft Punk in the year of Get Lucky. You spent the summer of 2013, a summer with Random Access Memories in it, listening to a band whose entire footprint in your history is five songs, and you played the other four a combined nine times.

You wake up to Basmati. Every morning. 91 morning plays of a two-minute piano piece by a Canadian in a dressing gown, and you have played the rest of Solo Piano a combined twenty times. It is an album of fifteen short piano pieces. They are all quite similar. You picked one and made it an alarm clock, which is the most Windows XP thing a person can do to a French-Canadian pianist. Before Basmati there was Carousel #3, 83 plays, same job. You do not have a taste in neo-classical music. You have a vacancy.

Speaking of mornings: on one of them, at the end of August 2019, you played a track called Forbidden Games - Jeux Interdits Classical Music for the New Age by an artist called Spa Music 38 times. The artist is called Spa Music. That is not a band. That is a category. It is what a hotel puts on when it cannot afford a licence, and you sat in it for two hours like a man who has lost a bet with a towel. The same year you gave Nicole Kidman 36 plays of One Day I'll Fly Away, making her your eighth most played artist of 2019, above Chase & Status. Nicole Kidman. Above Chase & Status. The academy gave her an Oscar and you gave her a bigger platform.

And Todd Baker. You started An Endless Desert 227 times and skipped it 74% of the time. That is 168 occasions on which you pressed play on a piece of ambient music called An Endless Desert, listened to part of an endless desert, and thought, no, not today, not this desert. Then you came back and did it again. For six years. The track is titled to warn you. You are the only person in the history of recorded sound to be repeatedly surprised by the length of something called An Endless Desert.

77% of your plays are on weekdays. You are a nine-to-five listener. Your music has a lanyard. The weekend over-index list, the artists you turn to when the working week loosens its grip, includes Spa Music, Adele and Michael Bublé, which means your idea of letting go is a Canadian crooner and a hotel lobby. Bublé, incidentally, gets 179 plays in the last twelve days of every December and is otherwise unmentioned, like a relative you tolerate at Christmas, which is exactly what he is. His most played song in your history is It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas, 24 plays. It is beginning to look a lot like a man who owns one Christmas album and thinks that is a tradition.

Finally, Taylor Swift. 118 plays in 2025, your fourth most played artist of the year, first serious contact a full nineteen years after her debut and, judging by the seventeen years of streaming history in this report, at an age at which most people have stopped discovering pop stars and started discovering gardening. There is no shame in liking Taylor Swift. There is a small amount of shame in arriving via Message In A Bottle (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault), a song that was cut from an album in 2012 and re-recorded in 2021, so that your entry point to the most famous musician alive was a B-side of a B-side. It over-indexes in your mornings. You put Taylor Swift on after Basmati. You are, and the numbers are very clear about this, having a lovely time.

Your taste on trial

The Crown versus your listening history. Five charges, exhibits drawn from the record, a defence that has done its homework, and a verdict that will please nobody entirely.

The case for the prosecution

The prosecution opens by reminding the court that the defendant had 4,979 artists at their disposal and 14,924 tracks, and elected to spend half of their listening on 660 of them. It then lays five charges.

The case for the defence

The defence does not dispute the exhibits. It disputes what they mean.

On repetition. The prosecution calls it wearing down. The defence calls it the same instinct that has kept Techno Fan in the defendant's life for fifteen years, 201 plays from October 2011 to 2025, and Aotearoa for sixteen, 220 plays from 2011 to 2026. Forty songs in this history have spans of ten years or more. Beautiful Life was found on 18 May 2010 and was still being played in November 2024. A person who plays a song 222 times in a day is a person who, when they love something, does not let go of it. The prosecution's own exhibit proves loyalty.

On breadth. 4,979 distinct artists. Twenty-seven connection countries. In 2011 the defendant heard 611 artists for the first time; in 2013, 443; in 2026, so far, 306, the highest discovery figure in thirteen years. A listener who spent half their time on 660 tracks spent the other half on 14,000. The prosecution would prefer you not to do the arithmetic.

On depth. The defence produces Nina Simone, 165 plays across 30 distinct tracks since 2013, and Miles Davis, 127 plays and 23 tracks, most of Kind Of Blue and some of Bitches Brew. It produces Norah Jones, 107 distinct tracks, and Goldfrapp, 129. A trimmer does not get 129 tracks deep into Goldfrapp.

On seriousness. Max Richter, 155 plays, top artist of 2022. Mychael Danna's Life of Pi score, 215 album plays, more than Black Holes and Revelations by Muse (214). Hans Zimmer, 101. Yann Tiersen, 99, across 32 tracks. The defendant listens to film scores as albums. The prosecution's Bublé point is answered by pointing out that the same person who plays Holly Jolly Christmas twenty times a year has also played Max Richter's recomposed Vivaldi 141 times, and that a taste which can hold both is wider than one which can hold only the second.

On skipping. The 40% of 2024 was a single bad year in a record whose lifetime average is 19.6%. In 2013 the figure was 11%. In 2026 it is 21% and falling. The defence notes that An Endless Desert was started 227 times, and that a listener who skipped it 168 times also chose it 59 times to the end, which is 59 more completed listens of a long ambient piece than most people manage in a lifetime. The defence rests, though it would like it noted that the prosecution has not once mentioned Elderbrook, BOYY or Model Man, because the defendant's current listening is inconveniently good.

The verdict

The jury

Nine jurors, none of them real, each handed the same seventeen years of evidence and asked for an opinion. They were not asked to agree, and they did not.

The jurors are archetypes rather than people: a 1990s breaks producer, a classical pianist, a Radio 1 dance DJ, a critic of the Pitchfork school, a jazz bassist, a Gen Z TikTok curator, a wedding DJ, a Berlin techno purist and a Nashville songwriter. Each spoke for about a minute. The foreman, the wedding DJ, was chosen because she was the only one who had heard of every artist on the list.

The split verdict

Predicting your star ratings

Twenty-five songs by artists you have never played, each with a predicted star rating and the reasoning behind it. Rate them yourself and find out how well seventeen years of history actually predicts you.

The predictions are built from the shape of your listening rather than from a mood. Five songs are predicted five stars because they sit in the seams between your anchors, between Jungle (587 listens since 2013) and Maribou State (117), between Norah Jones (347) and Michael Bublé (372). Five are predicted one star because they have the abrasiveness you have never once touched: the heaviest thing in your whole history is Biffy Clyro, 181 plays in 2011 and then nothing since 2013. The middle fifteen are the interesting ones, where the guess is genuinely uncertain.

Rate all twenty-five, then press the button. You get the agreement figures (exact matches, within one star, mean absolute error) and a short verdict on which clusters you rated higher or lower than expected. That verdict then chooses a second round of fifteen songs from a pool of forty-five, weighted towards the clusters where you outperformed the prediction. If you rate the folk picks two stars above the model, round two leans folk. If you punish the leftfield picks, round two mostly leaves them alone. Your ratings are saved in this browser, so you can come back to it.

Musical twenty questions

One artist you have never heard, found in eight to twelve questions. Every question is phrased against something you actually did: the 271 autumn plays of Julia, the 399 Adele plays in a single June day, the Basmati alarm clock.

The first three or four questions decide the neighbourhood. Kick drum or none is the first fork, because since May 2024 DROELOE (310 listens) and Elderbrook (260) have made that the biggest single split in your listening. From there it asks whether you want a voice, whether it should be for a field or a bedroom, whether this is a Nina Simone mood or a José González one, and whether there should be any singer at all, which is the Max Richter and Chilly Gonzales corner that took over your 2022.

Once it knows the neighbourhood it asks finer questions, only the ones that actually separate the two candidates left standing: track length, real drums or programmed ones, whether the record can be older than 1990, whether it is an after-midnight record. "Not sure" is always allowed and counts for nothing either way. You can step back one question at a time, and each answer stays pinned below so you can see the path. At the end you get one artist, the reason it fits you, and three songs to start with. Twenty artists are hidden in the tree, all checked against your history, so "play again" will usually find you someone different.

The ten-round recommendation game

Ten rounds, three songs each, all by artists with zero listens in your history. Pick the one you would rather hear. By round ten the game should know you well enough to name one more artist you will like.

Behind the cards every song has a position on eight axes: tempo, acoustic, vocal-forward, electronic, era, melancholy, groove and leftfield. Your picks move a taste vector towards what you chose and gently away from what you rejected. Round one is deliberately wide, three songs from three unrelated clusters. From round two the game picks from the songs nearest your vector and looks for a trio that are close to each other, so the choices get harder as it learns. A pool of 98 songs across nine clusters feeds it, from the melodic house that Ben Böhmer (48 listens since January 2025) opened up for you, through the 1970s jazz-funk that Curtis Mayfield's Move on Up (49 plays in Era 7) hinted at, to the post-rock and krautrock you have never gone near.

After the tenth pick you get your profile in words, the five picks that best define it, a bar for each axis, and a final recommendation: the artist in the pool nearest to your vector whom the game has not already shown you. Progress is saved in this browser; the reset button wipes it and starts again with a fresh, wide first round.

Five deliberately risky picks

Each of these looks wrong for you on the label. Each has zero plays in your history, checked against every artist you have ever streamed. The case for each is made from your own numbers.

Your missing link

One artist you have never played, with zero listens across seventeen years, who has worked with, remixed, produced or grown up alongside more of your favourites than anyone else. His name is Kieran Hebden and he records as Four Tet.

Four Tet does not appear anywhere in your 4,979 artists. Not once, not sampled, not skipped. This is odd, because he is standing in the middle of your history like a man at a party who knows everyone and has somehow never been introduced to you. He remixed the band whose album xx you played 266 times. He made a record with the producer you have played 67 times in the last four years. His oldest friend is in your list. His school-days remix subject is in your list. The vocalist he sampled for his most played club track is in your list. The web below shows the connections, each with your own listen count attached.

Twelve of your artists, 823 of your listens between them, and every one of those threads runs through the same person. Four Tet is what you would get if you took your 2011 indie-electronic self (The xx, Bloc Party), your 2013 producer-worship (Skrillex, Jamie xx), your 2018 quiet phase (his folk-sampling early records are closer to José González than to techno) and your 2024 to 2026 melodic house convert, and asked them to agree on one record collection. He is also, usefully, someone who makes ninety-minute records and two-minute ones, so both the man who played An Endless Desert 59 times and the man who skipped it 168 times are catered for.

A six-song route in

Sequenced from the most familiar-sounding to the most Four Tet, so that by song six you are somewhere you have never been and it feels like you chose it.

How this was built

The recommendations are opinions, but the facts they rest on are not.

Your export contains 95,925 plays from 24 March 2009 to 28 August 2026. Every play of 30 seconds or more counts as a listen; that gives 77,126 listens across 4,979 artists, 14,924 tracks and 2,443 days. The history report computes eras, obsessions, exes, second lives, skips, time-of-day habits and the rest directly from those rows. This report takes that picture of your taste and asks what is missing from it.

Every artist described here as new to you was checked against the complete list of artists in your export, including ones you played once. Where an artist appears with one or two plays, the text says so and treats them as sampled rather than new. Play counts and dates quoted for artists you already know come from the export. Release dates and breakthrough moments come from general knowledge and are stated as such.

Songs from your own history link to the exact Spotify track you played. Recommendations link to a Spotify search for the song and artist, which opens directly in the app. The three games in sections 37 to 39 run entirely in your browser and remember your progress on this device only; nothing is sent anywhere.

A note on taste. The recommendations lean on the artists you kept coming back to for years (Jungle, The xx, Florence + The Machine, Chase & Status, Calvin Harris, Hot Chip) and on the ones you have chosen most recently (Elderbrook, BOYY, Maribou State, ODESZA, Model Man, Olivia Dean), rather than on the one-summer obsessions, on the theory that what you return to is a better guide to what you will love than what you binged once.