The 2020 candidates on Spotify

What can Spotify data tell us about how some presidential campaigns are targeting voters?

Lizzo is one thing The Democratic Party can agree on. Three 2020 candidates have integrated Spotify into their campaigns: Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In their playlists, she’s featured more than any other artist, and only she and Aretha Franklin appear on all three.

While it’s easy to notice Lizzo in each playlist, we can use Spotify’s datasets to reveal less obvious trends. Spotify makes a track’s popularity, stylistic information, and other metadata publicly available—data which can be useful in understanding not only the audience each candidate is targeting, but also how the candidate wants to be seen by that audience.

The analysis will consider three playlists: “Buttijams” from the Buttigieg campaign, “Gillibrand 2020” from the Gillibrand campaign, and “Kamala’s Summer Playlist” from the Harris campaign, shown in the timeline below. (The full playlists are also embedded at the bottom of this article.) There are others that exist: Biden released playlists alongside Obama in 2016, and Beto O’Rourke released a very Texan playlist during his Senate campaign. In 2017, Harris released a playlist to celebrate African American Music Appreciation Month under her official Senator account, and Buttigieg’s most popular playlist is “50 years, 50 Anthems: Pride 2019.” With this in mind, however, it’s more straightforward to focus on the playlists that are explicitly for the 2020 presidential campaign. All data was collected August 1.