FAA-licensed commercial space launches

As more rockets have left Earth, more people have streamed whoever happens to be the biggest artist on Spotify, a correlation that connects orbital mechanics to pop music with the casual disregard for logic that only a scatter plot can achieve. The coefficient is 0.951 across eight years, during which both metrics rose with exponential confidence, suggesting that the same civilization launching Starlink satellites is also listening to Drake on repeat. Both activities involve sending something into the atmosphere and hoping for the best.

Commercial space launches grew from about 20 per year in 2015 to over 80 by 2022, driven almost entirely by SpaceX's cadence of Starlink deployments and commercial missions. Spotify's top artist streams grew from about 5 billion to over 20 billion, reflecting the platform's user growth from 90 million to over 500 million and the streaming economy's tendency to concentrate listens around a smaller number of global superstars. Both trends are technology adoption curves that happen to be in their exponential phase during the same decade: reusable rockets made space launches cheap enough to be frequent, while smartphone ubiquity made music streaming the default consumption mode. The shared variable is global connectivity—the same networks that stream music also depend on the satellites being launched.

Eight data points of rockets and streams rising together is a portrait of a decade in which both space and music became industrialized at scale. The rockets carry the satellites that carry the internet that carries the streams. The loop is almost closed, which makes this correlation slightly less spurious than it appears. Almost.