SpaceX launches per year

It appears that whenever Elon Musk decides to hurl another metal tube into the void, the universe responds by making a Swedish pop star slightly more popular, which suggests either that space exploration and streaming music are locked in some sort of cosmic dance, or that we have simply become very good at finding patterns in the noise of two entirely unrelated industries both trying desperately to grow. The correlation sits at 0.97, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous and pattern-seeking humans insufferable at parties.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly a convergence of two parallel booms driven by the same underlying tide: economic growth, technological improvement, and a global population increasingly capable of both launching rockets and subscribing to music services. SpaceX's launch cadence grew from the wreckage of the space shuttle program and commercial space's gradual maturation, while Spotify's top artist streams benefited from years of increased smartphone penetration, internet bandwidth expansion, and the simple fact that there were more people on Earth streaming music in 2024 than in 2015. If you lined up these ten years, you'd find that global GDP grew at a similar trajectory, smartphone users increased by roughly 2 billion people, and both Musk's ambitions and the music industry's consolidation around streaming platforms were riding the same wave of capital and infrastructure investment.

The lesson here is not that rockets make Spotify hits, but rather that when you examine enough pairs of growing things in a growing world, you will find correlations so strong they feel like causation, and that our appetite for meaning-making exceeds our supply of actual connections. We see what we're looking for, which is to say we see almost everything. Neither SpaceX launches nor Spotify streams caused the other; they were both symptoms of the same patient, and the patient is us, multiplying.