Spin AtlasHow to see your Spotify listening history by year
To see your Spotify top artists in a specific year, request Extended Streaming History and import its extracted JSON files into Spin Atlas. Open that year’s season, follow an artist across your recorded years, and choose personal awards without changing the listening statistics.
Get the history that covers your years
Spotify describes Extended Streaming History as listening across your account’s lifetime. Ordinary Account Data includes a shorter history and is not the Spotify format Spin Atlas accepts. See Spotify’s data reference, checked November 6, 2026, and request the extended package from Account Privacy.
When it arrives, extract the ZIP and keep the music streaming-history JSON files together. Choose Import history, select Spotify, and select the relevant files from one download. The file-selection walkthrough explains what to include.
Check the import timezone, date coverage, accepted plays and skipped entries before opening your book. Each event’s end timestamp determines its calendar date and year in that timezone.
One artist, three different seasons
This example uses four real artist names with entirely fictional listening dates, counts and song labels. Every recorded play lasts three minutes. It demonstrates the calculations; it does not describe anyone’s actual history.
| Year | Kendrick plays | Kendrick minutes | Artist rank | All artists’ plays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 1,200 | 3,600 | 1 | 3,500 |
| 2023 | 600 | 1,800 | 4 | 3,450 |
| 2024 | 980 | 2,940 | 2 | 3,980 |
- Start with a season. Open Seasons and choose 2024. Taylor Swift leads this fictional year with 1,450 plays; Kendrick Lamar is second with 980. These are this archive’s personal rankings, not global Spotify charts.
- Open the artist’s career. Follow Kendrick into his artist page. His 1,200 + 600 + 980 plays total 2,780 across the three recorded years, or 8,340 minutes. The career view makes the first-place season, fourth-place season and return to second visible together.
- Decide what deserves an award. If Kendrick is your personal artist of 2024, choose him for Artist MVP. Taylor remains first by plays and Kendrick remains second; the award records your choice separately.
The example’s personal 2024 award is a possible next step, not a change shown in the career screenshot. The awards example explains how a measured leader and your chosen winner can differ.
Read plays and minutes as different measures
New books use recorded plays for automatic rankings and awards. Measured minutes describe listening time. They match proportionally in this three-minute example, but tracks of different lengths can produce different leaders. Sorting a table by minutes does not change an automatic award.
Valid Spotify music events with positive listening time count, including short plays. These are not completed-song counts or Spotify’s official stream metric. Zero-duration and non-music entries are excluded. Use Artists, Songs or Albums and the date controls to explore a month or another range.
Can I recover my exact old Spotify Wrapped?
Spin Atlas builds a record book from the events in your export. It does not recover Spotify’s original Wrapped stories or reproduce their exact results. You can examine the recorded artists, songs and albums for a calendar year, but should not label that reconstruction your original Wrapped.
Check what the archive can tell you
A first or latest season may cover only part of a year; an intervening year is not proof of complete capture either. Check the dates in Data before interpreting a lower total. An absent year cannot prove that you listened to nothing, and Spin Atlas cannot reconstruct missing records.
An artist’s first recorded appearance is not necessarily when you discovered them. The career page describes this archive, not every place you have ever heard music.
Keep your history and choices
Importing calculates the book in your browser without uploading your listening files. Browser saving is optional. Choosing Save online uploads the calculated book and your choices to private account storage. Keep the original export for future imports, and read Privacy for storage, usage counters and optional release lookups.