Spotify users skip a lot. Teenagers and weekenders are mostly to blame, according to The Echo Nest

The great thing about Spotify is that it allows listeners to listen to a whole album with only one press of a button, and minimal commercial interference. Well, it's great unless you're almost everyone who uses Spotify. Paul Lamere, director of developer platform for The Echo Nest (a data analysis firm that was acquired by Spotify in March) presented a number of graphs that indicate we as users skip a lot of songs.

The statistic that has the biggest impact on likelihood to skip a track seems to be age, based on Lamere's findings. The graph he presents shows that those around 10 years old skip nearly 60 percent of the songs that come up during a listening session. That number remains high but continues to decrease until it gets to age 35, where listeners skip around 25 percent of songs. The main point to take from this is that nearly all teenagers skip more than 50 percent of songs. Following 35 however, the number of skips increases again until the estimated age of 48, which averages about 42 percent skips. That number again flows down until the age of 60.

Perhaps less dramatic but more interesting is our tendency to skip based on day of the week. The lowest rates of skipping occur on Monday through Wednesday, the days in which we all know we're working the hardest. This indicates that people listen to music as they work (we are in fact listening to Lykke Li's new album at the moment), using it more for background noise (we're actually listening, we swear). The less they pay attention, the less likely they are to skip. Therefore skipping jumps above 50 percent for Saturday and Sunday, when people actually tune in to what they're tuning in to.

The most frightening statistic (to us music nerds at least) is the point at which a song is skipped: Nearly 25 percent of music is skipped within five seconds. How are you supposed to find new music if you skip everything within five seconds?!?

Oh, that's right. You've got Music Times to tell you what to check out.

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Spotify