Spotify monthly active users

Spotify's monthly active users and US frozen pizza retail sales moved together between 2015 and 2022 with a correlation of 0.9732, which is either a damning indictment of what people do while streaming music or a triumphant validation of the 'horizontal listening' lifestyle. Market researchers have long suspected that premium streaming subscribers are also premium frozen pizza consumers, united by a desire for something good that requires almost no effort. The data now confirms this at a 0.97 confidence level.

Spotify's monthly active users grew from approximately 75 million in 2015 to over 450 million by 2022, expanding globally and across demographics as streaming became the default music consumption model. US frozen pizza retail sales grew from around $5 billion to over $6.5 billion over the same period, accelerating significantly during the 2020-2021 pandemic years when at-home food consumption spiked and consumers upgraded their pantry staples. Both experienced their sharpest growth during the pandemic's early phase, when people were home, streaming more, and cooking less. That shared pandemic acceleration is doing a significant amount of work in this correlation.

Shared external shocks — like a global pandemic — can manufacture high correlations between variables that would otherwise merely drift in the same direction. The event becomes the hidden variable, and its fingerprint looks like correlation.