The Music the East Coast Listened to When It (Briefly) Got Warm, According to Spotify Data
Like the Kool-Aid man hauling ass through a wall into your living room, summer weather came out of nowhere this week for the Mid-Atlantic region.
The Weather Channel called it a "burst of summer-like heat" that skyrocketed temperatures into the 90s well ahead of schedule. As a New Yorker, it was almost a shock—going from chilly, damp weather, miserably packing into crowded subway cars running on a hopelessly broken system to having bright, sweat-inducing weather ... miserably packing into crowded subway cars running on a hopelessly broken system.
In all seriousness, it was kind of nice! The sun came out! Shorts! T-shirts! Walking around and not having to hide beneath your collar to brace yourself for the chilly wind!
And as the weather changes, surely our music taste does as well. Think about it: if you're in the mid-Atlantic or Northeast—where half the year the weather is basically crap—coming out of that trash-shoot is a huge relief, which would probably change what kind of music you want to listen to. It's why we have Songs Of The Summer—tunes meant to be played outside with a cold beverage and a few friends.
So that in mind, we asked music-streaming service Spotify which songs people in the Mid-Atlantic played when it got warm this week. The good folks at Spotify scraped data from Mid-Atlantic states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia and West Virginia—comparing what people played on cold days at the end of April to the warm days at the start of May.
"The nice thing is that we're looking at a total timespan of Saturday to Thursday, which doesn't cross any Fridays, which is when new releases happen—so these increases were not due to the tracks being released," Spotify communications representative Eliot Van Buskirk wrote to Newsweek in an email.
Without further ado, here are the 20 songs that trended the most from May 1-3 as the weather got warm, according to Spotify:
1. J Balvin - Positivo
2. Joe - I Wanna Know
3. Toni Braxton - He Wasn't Man Enough
4. Lonestar - Amazed
5. Diplo - Suicidal (feat. Desiigner)
6. Santana - Maria Maria - Radio Mix
7. Santana - Smooth
8. Jimmy Buffett - Margaritaville
9. Vertical Horizon - Everything You Want
10. Creed - Higher
11. Sigala - Sweet Lovin' - Radio Edit
12. Sublime - Badfish
13. Sisqo - Thong Song
14. Brian McKnight - Back At One
15. Taylor Swift - All You Had To Do Was Stay
16. 2Pac - Hail Mary
17. DJ Megan Ryte - On & On (feat. Tory Lanez & HoodCelebrityy)
18. Third Eye Blind - Never Let You Go - 2008 Version
19. Creed - With Arms Wide Open
20. Big Pun - Still Not a Player (Remix) - Radio Version
It's an ... eclectic mix. Two Creed songs is ... something. But you've gotta love the on-the-nose beauty of people playing "Smooth" by Santana—a song that famously (infamously?) opens with the lines "Man, it's a hot one / Like seven inches from the midday sun."
If you want to listen while the sunshine lasts, here's the playlist.
