Spotify ($SPOT) is the world's largest music streaming service, claiming 159 million active users and 70 million paying subscribers. In terms of listeners, it beats out Pandora, Apple Music, and iHeartRadio. It's also now a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $28 billion.

That's a lot of users and dollars.

So when are those millions of people listening to music? We looked at hourly logs of Spotify listening traction since August 2017 for both guests and members, grouped by hour of the day, and summed up the concurrent user counts for each hour. For the data below, we looked at over 12,740 points of Spotify user engagement.

The Chart

It turns out that amongst both free and paid subscribers, streaming peaks at 4:00pm, probably when people need a little gas to get them through the workday.

The second-most popular time to listen to Spotify is 8:00pm, perhaps when people are home after a long day or gearing up for a night out.

The least-popular Spotify listening time is 7:00am when people are getting ready or heading in to work.

The Table

Sorted by time of day, it's clear that users listen to the most music on Spotify in the late afternoon and evening. Early morning tends to be the service's least-active time for music streaming.

Hour

Count (Sum)

4:00 PM

1,509,213

8:00 PM

1,505,246

5:00 PM

1,503,705

7:00 PM

1,494,161

6:00 PM

1,483,930

9:00 PM

1,482,570

3:00 PM

1,397,618

10:00 PM

1,394,035

11:00 PM

1,248,027

2:00 PM

1,245,455

1:00 PM

1,154,537

12:00 AM

1,091,461

12:00 PM

1,076,632

1:00 AM

1,049,893

11:00 AM

1,017,393

3:00 AM

976,544

10:00 AM

963,571

4:00 AM

938,390

9:00 AM

919,892

5:00 AM

907,357

8:00 AM

887,335

2:00 AM

883,447

6:00 AM

882,807

7:00 AM

869,405

Dataset can be found here for subscribers.

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