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Spotify Year in Music 2015: This is what you were listening to in the year of rap’s ascendance

The five most-listened-to albums were all hip-hop

Christopher Hooton
Monday 07 December 2015 05:32 EST
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Spotify today releases its annual Year in Music feature, a fun little tool that shows just how many hours of your life you spent on the streaming service the past 365 days.

Its use of data gets smarter each year, and this time round focuses on: your total listenage in minutes, hours and days, your most-streamed artist and album, the track you started your year with and which three artists soundtracked each of the four seasons for you.

I, for instance, spent most of the winter listening to Drake and Future thanks to their mixtape, while Vince Staples was my sound of summer due to his appropriately named album, Summertime ’06.

I wasn’t alone either, as Spotify took the Year in Music as a chance to reveal that “rap took its domination of the mainstream to a whole new level this year by accounting for all five of 2015’s albums, and seven of the top ten.

“From Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky to Future and Big Sean, hip-hop brought a ridiculous amount of talent to the table.”

The biggest non-rap artist to chart, perhaps surprisingly, was Mumford & Sons, thanks to their new album Wilder Mind.

We could see rap’s domination coming, with Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly LP and Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late mixtape both breaking Spotify records early in the year.

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