Account data or extended streaming history: which Spotify download you actually need.

Spotify does not give you one data download. It gives you a choice of several from the same privacy page, and they are separate products with separate contents and separate waiting times. The names are close enough that people tick the first one, wait, and open a file that holds a fraction of what they wanted.

This is the one decision in the whole process that is expensive to get wrong, so it is worth two minutes before you click.

Ask for the one called "Extended streaming history"

Look for the option named Extended streaming history and tick that one. We are deliberately not telling you how many boxes are on the page or what order they appear in, because Spotify has changed that layout before and guides written a year apart currently disagree about it. The name is stable. Count on the name.

What "Account data" actually contains

Account data is a snapshot of your account rather than a history of your listening. Spotify describes it as covering your profile, playlists, library, search queries, follow counts, payment details and support history, plus streaming history from roughly the past year.

That last clause is the whole problem. If you opened your account in 2017, Account data gives you about an eighth of your listening life and presents it as your data, because it is your data. It is just not the file that answers the question you asked.

What the extended history contains

The extended streaming history is the record Spotify is obliged to give you under the GDPR. It runs from your first play to the day the file was generated, and Spotify's own documentation lists twenty-one data points recorded for every stream. The ones that matter for statistics are these.

• Milliseconds played, which is what makes real listening time possible rather than an estimate from track counts
• Reason the track started and reason it ended, which is how skips are actually derived
• Shuffle, offline and private session flags
• Platform and country, so you can separate the phone from the desktop, or a holiday from a normal week
• Track, artist and album names, plus the Spotify URI for each

It also contains your IP address and user agent for each stream, which is worth knowing before you upload the file anywhere. Quilore reads it in your browser and never uploads it, which is the reason this site exists, but the general point stands for any tool you hand it to.

Account data answers "what is on my account". Extended streaming history answers "what have I listened to". Only one of those is a statistics file.

How long each takes, and why every guide says something different

Here we are going to be straight with you rather than confident, because the sources genuinely conflict and we would rather say so than invent a number.

Spotify's stated position is that gathering your data should not take longer than thirty days. Account data is the quicker of the two and commonly arrives within a few days. For the extended history, published guides range from "usually the next day" to "two to four weeks", and they cannot all be right.

What we can tell you is the shape of it. The official ceiling is thirty days, the practical experience reported by most people is much faster, and neither of those is a promise Spotify has made to you specifically. Plan for weeks, be pleased if it is days, and do not make the request the night before you want the numbers.

If you are unsure, tick both

Requesting both options is harmless. You get two separate emails and two separate zip files, on their own timelines, and nothing about asking for Account data slows down or interferes with the extended history. Quilore ignores the account data zip entirely.

The only genuine mistake is ticking Account data alone, because you will wait, receive a real file, and have no obvious signal that it is the wrong one. It will simply look like you started listening last year.

One field in the extended export is wrong, and it matters

This is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is the reason we do not read the file the obvious way.

The export contains a skipped field. You would reasonably assume it tells you whether you skipped that track. For a large stretch of history it does not. Across streams dated between 13 April 2015 and 16 October 2022 the field reads false for everything, with a normal mix of true and false on either side of that range. This matches what an independent analysis of a separate export found, which is why we are comfortable stating the dates.

The consequence is quietly awful. A tool that counts skips by reading that field will tell you that you skipped almost nothing for seven years. That is not a bug you would ever notice, because the answer looks like a fact about you rather than an artefact of the file. It is the exact failure mode this site was built to avoid: a number that is wrong and looks right.

The fix is to derive skips from the reason a track ended rather than from the flag. A stream that ended because you pressed forward or back was a skip whatever the skipped field claims.

What happens next

Confirm the request from the email Spotify sends you, or it never starts. Then wait. When the zip arrives you can read it here without uploading it anywhere, or with any other tool you trust, and the file will be the same either way.

If you want the steps with nothing else attached, the request guide has them in order. If you have already asked and are counting days, the waiting page explains what arrives and when.