Spotify's 'Serendipity' Animation Is Incredibly Enlightening

Information is a terrifying, exceedingly wonderful thing. We'd never get anywhere without it, but, by the same token, sometimes it feels like the globe-spanning companies that increasingly form a part of our daily lives have a little too much information at their fingertips.

It's just lucky that sometimes that data gets put to a use that doesn't involve tailoring your social media feeds into custom-made billboards.

In this instance, Spotify have commissioned resident code artist Kyle McDonald to create Serendipity, an interactive world map that analyses raw Spotify data, determines when, during a given hour on a given day, a particular song had its "play" button hit at the same time by two people in different locations, and throws up a neat little graphic to show the track played and distance between users, while the soundtrack hops between fragments of the songs in question.

It's all a rather gorgeous, fluid exercise in confluence. Have a look at some of the combos that have occurred so far, then check it out for yourself.