Ever wonder if someone else in the world is doing the exact same thing you're doing at this very moment? Like, if you just pressed play on that catchy song "Stolen Dance," what are the odds that someone else across the globe did too?
It's a pretty trippy thing to think about and now Spotify is giving us a visual of this phenomenon in action. The music streaming service is celebrating the way music unites us all with a new project, dubbed Serendipity, which visualizes simultaneous music listening worldwide.
Created by interactive artist Kyle McDonald, Spotify's first Media Artist in Residence, Serendipity is an animated world map showing when two people start listening to the same song at the same time on Spotify — across borders. This interactive art project is based on real-time data, and it's pretty cool to see. Check it out for yourself.
Each tune only plays for about three seconds, but if a song catches your ear, click on it and information about it will open in another browser tab (right), giving you the chance to listen to a longer clip and then sign into Spotify and hear the entire thing.
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"Although they might not speak the same languages, live in the same climates, or believe the same things, they're playing the same song at the same time," Spotify's Eliot Van Buskirk wrote in a blog post Thursday. "We've always known that music brings people together — and now, we can see that togetherness in real time."
To show up on Serendipity, two people must have started listening to the same song on Spotify within a tenth of a second of each other, in different towns or time zones.
"I've heard estimates that half a million people are in airplanes at any moment, forming a sort of city in the sky," Serendipity creator McDonald said in a statement. "Maybe Serendipity shows a similar sort of never-ending worldwide music festival. I hope that when people watch it they feel something that reminds them of listening to music with friends, and they think about what music can do to connect people."
For more, see PCMag's reviews of Spotify for iPhone and Android.