As a long-time Last.fm user (about 15 years) and a data nerd, I’ve always been curious about my listening patterns. I used to look at my data by downloading a CSV and creating some chart via tidyverse functions. This time I decided to build a Shiny App that visualizes my Last.fm streaming history — and it turned out to be both fun and insightful!
What the App Does
My app provides an interactive dashboard that helps me explore my music habits over time. Here’s what it includes:
Date Range Filter – Narrow down the data to a specific period.
Summary Stats – Total streams, favorite artist, and most-played song for the selected period.
Daily Streaming Trends – A time series showing how my listening activity fluctuates day-to-day.
Top Artists – A bar chart of my most-listened-to artists.
Artist Stream Trends – A line plot tracking how my top 5 artists’ streams vary over time.
Listening Hours – A circular plot showing what times of day I listen most, split between weekdays and weekends.
The dashboard updates dynamically as you adjust the date range, and the favorite artist/song tiles make it easy to get quick insights.
How I build it
Basically I used an API to get my Last.fm data and then I used R + Shiny to create the dashboard.
I used Shinyapps.io to deploy which was very easy.
What I Learned
Time-based data can tell surprisingly rich stories — I noticed I listen to music most often in the early evenings, with a dip on weekends.
My music taste changed in years of course but my love for Arctic Monkeys stayed the same.
Building a Shiny app is a great way to practice not only R programming but also data storytelling and UI design. In this particular example I showed everything in one page layout but it is doable to expand more and breathing scrollable page.
Shinyapps.io is very easy to deploy. I had my app on my local (I used Github for version control) and by using this two lines of code it was ready to go:
library(rsconnect)
rsconnect::deployApp('~/Documents/projects/myshinyapp')
- Debugging dynamic UI elements takes patience… but it’s worth it.