What was music to Indian ears in 2022?

While the company only gives away select statistics, such as most streamed artists, the Spotify app features playlists of the most streamed tracks. The data from these playlists can be used to answer an even more interesting question: How India’s music taste compared to the world in 2022.

Earlier this week, streaming service Spotify released its statistics for 2022 – on your app, it appeared as “Spotify Wrapped”. While the company only gives away select statistics, such as most streamed artists, the Spotify app features playlists of the most streamed tracks. The data from these playlists can be used to answer an even more interesting question: How India’s music taste compared to the world in 2022. Spotify’s API gives detailed audio features of tracks that can gives us an insight into the kind of music Indian users gravitate towards.

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First, some caveats

Before comparing India and the world, it is important to note that the average Indian on Spotify is not necessarily the average Indian. For example, in the week ended November 24, the streams of India’s top 200 tracks added up to 296 million. This number was 588 million for the USA and 328 million for Brazil. This is when India’s population is about 2.6 times the combined population of these two countries. On the other hand, 10 tracks among the top songs of the world, such as “Heat Waves” by the British band Glass Animals or “As It Was” by Harry Styles, also feature in the top songs of India, making the Indian listener (on Spotify at least) somewhat like the global one.

India listened to somewhat more instrumental and speech-like music...

Spotify’s algorithm rates songs on a scale of 0 to 1 on what it describes as “instrumentalness” depending on the presence of vocals in the track (except “ooh” and “aah” sounds are treated as instrumental). So, if a track’s value is above 0.5, it is more likely to be instrumental-based than vocal.

Similarly, the algorithm describes “speechiness” as a measure of how speech-like a track is. If a track carries a value of above 0.66, it means there’s a high probability that it is made without music (such as poetry). Meanwhile, tracks carrying values in the 0.33-0.66 range suggest are likely to be rap, which generally tends to be more speech-based than other forms of music. No track on the global top 50 tracks of the year crosses the 0.5 for “instrumentalness” or 0.33 threshold “speechiness”.

However, on the India-list (which has top 75 songs), rapper Sidhu Moosewala’s “The Last Ride” and Tamil movie Vikram’s soundtrack “Pathala Pathala” were in the 0.33-0.66 range. Somewhat surprisingly, (or perhaps because of the “aah’ and “eh” vowel sounds in the song) musical duo Mitraz’s song Akhiyaan scores 0.7 on “instrumentalness” despite scoring just 0.05 on “speechiness”. To be sure, while these extremes affect the mean, the median or middle value of India’s top tracks were just 1/10,000th of the index away from the global median.

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...Which was less loud, and faster than the global average

A bigger difference between the Indian and global listener was that the former streamed tracks that were less loud and faster. The average Indian song was about 1.2 decibels below the global average (by both mean and median). However, the median top track in India had a tempo of 119 beats per minute (BPM) compared to 115.5 BPM for the world. India’s tempo range (132 BPM) of top songs was also significantly wider compared to the world (110 BPM) – suggesting a much wider variety of tracks being heard in India. To be sure, the fastest track on the India list (“Until I Found You”) is not made by Indian musicians, but American singer-songwriter Stephen Sanchez.

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And also songs that are less energetic, danceable, and happy

These three metrics are also measured on a 0-1 scale. “Energetic” songs, for instance, are likely to be faster, louder, and noisier, where the median Indian song was a 1/10th of the index behind the global median. “Danceability”, on the other hand, is described as a combination of tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity. The average Indian song trailed the global average a little (3/100th of the index) in “danceability” as well.

Unsurprisingly, the cheerfulness and euphoria of the median Indian song (measured by a “valence” index) was also behind the global median by 2/100th. To be sure, with songs as wide apart as the “Bhool Bhulaiyya 2” title track and the single “Baarishein” by indie artist Anuv Jain, the range of Indian songs was wider on all three counts.

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Indians also didn’t mind older or longer songs

This is another interesting aspect that the Spotify data on tracks throws light on. We Indians did not mind if the song was not new or even if it was longer. The median Indian track was about 12.4 seconds longer than the median global track. The median release date of the Indian tracks was also around 76 days older than the global median.

The global range for age though was bigger with “Running Up That Hill” by British musician Kate Bush (released in 1985) getting renewed attention after featuring in the Netflix series “Stranger Things”.

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