I used to check streaming and billboard charts pretty often. As a musician myself, it was interesting to look for trends in the way we listen to music. At some point, around 2022 or 2023, I started noticing that older songs were popping up on charts - for example, a song from 6 or 7 years ago would pop up occasionally on the charts after becoming a viral tik tok audio. Albums would hang out on the charts for more than a full year after release, which seemed like an anomally to me. It felt a odd that, in an age where attention spans were shorter than ever, and content was being pumped out at an exponentially increasing rate, we would be coming back to older songs in favour of the new and shiny thing. I decided to quantify this to see how trends in our listening habits have evolved over time, from before the streaming age, through the COVID19 pandemic and the age of tik tok, into the present day. I found myself in a rabbit hole of pulling data, and decided to map out some other trends I could find along the way.