Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community



Every second there are ten pairs of people on Spotify who start listening to the same song within a tenth of a second of each other — whether it’s obscure Norwegian black metal or the latest Enrique Iglesias song. As part of Spotify’s new Media Artist in Residence program, Kyle McDonald visualized the pairs in a project called Serendipity. By using d3.js, Storm and Spotify’s API, McDonald constructed a fast moving map around the world showing that music tastes may be quite local (only within miles of each other) or across several timezones. While McDonald said via Twitter that the real-time version is only in Spotify’s office, the one for the public on the web is still pretty interesting to watch. And be sure to have your headphones in — the songs change as the map moves.