Indians listened to somewhat more instrumental and speech-like music...

Spotify’s algorithm rates songs on a scale of 0 to 1 on what it describes as “instrumentalness” depending on the presence of vocals in the track (except “ooh” and “aah” sounds are treated as instrumental). So, if a track’s value is above 0.5, it is more likely to be instrumental-based than vocal. Similarly, the algorithm describes “speechiness” as a measure of how speech-like a track is. If a track carries a value of above 0.66, it means there’s a high probability that it is made without music (such as poetry). Meanwhile, tracks carrying values in the 0.33-0.66 range suggest are likely to be rap, which generally tends to be more speech-based than other forms of music. No track on the global top 50 tracks of the year crosses the 0.5 for “instrumentalness” or 0.33 threshold “speechiness”. However, on the India-list (which has top 75 songs), rapper Sidhu Moosewala’s “The Last Ride” and Tamil movie Vikram’s soundtrack “Pathala Pathala” were in the 0.33-0.66 range. Somewhat surprisingly, (or perhaps because of the “aah’ and “eh” vowel sounds in the song) musical duo

Mitraz’s song Akhiyaan scores 0.7 on “instrumentalness” despite scoring just 0.05 on “speechiness”. To be sure, while these extremes affect the mean, the median or middle value of India’s top tracks were just 1/10,000th of the index away from the global median.