This time of year, many people post their Spotify'Wrapped' lists, revealing which songs they played the most over the past 12 months. The online culture magazine The Pudding fed millions of indicators of what it deemed objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations'and subreddits you've never heard of.' In addition to rating your taste in tracks, the'How Bad Is Your Spotify?' app will tell you which songs you play too much and which artists you are obsessed with'to an uncomfortable extent.' Launching on Wednesday, it's proven successful enough to trend on Twitter. Logging into Spotify via the'How Bad is Your Spotify' allows the site to review and judge your'awful' taste in music Depending on how high traffic is, it may take a few moments for it to assess your taste in music.

Then left, another left, then left again. That's the typical movement your thumb might go through if you're trying to find "the one" on any dating app. In some circles, it's becoming more common to hear friends say they met their significant other via dating apps Tinder, Bumble or Hinge, but what about Spotify? For two emerging artists, the music-streaming service helped them connect, and fast forward, they're getting married. The lovebirds are trying to find out who's responsible.

Its chief economist has hinted that analysis of people's music choices could be a useful tool and give a "window on their soul". In a speech about new possibilities in data analytics, Andy Haldane said data on downloads from Spotify had been used to gain an insight into people's mood. Book lists, TV choices and even computer games could also be used to gauge consumer confidence. He said: "To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment." He said the results did at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the well-regarded Michigan survey of consumer confidence in the US.

It is 10pm on Tuesday, and I have just become the 1,106,079th Spotify user this month to listen to an artist called Charles Bolt. The track I'm playing, Far and Beyond, is a gentle piano instrumental, not unlike the music Yann Tiersen composed for the soundtrack of whimsical French movie Amélie. This, I confess, is proving something of a problem. I have been listening to gentle piano instrumentals not unlike the music Yann Tiersen composed for the soundtrack of Amélie all day, and I suspect I reached the limits of my tolerance for it some hours back. This music long ago ceased to make me feel chilled or peaceful or any of the adjectives used in the titles of the Spotify playlists that contain it. Now I suspect it has turned me faintly hysterical.

Since its launch in 2009, SoundHound has grown beyond a simple song recognition app -- it can recognize songs you hum, create Pandora and Spotify playlists with the songs it recognizes, and even find and play the corresponding music videos from YouTube. With its latest update, SoundHound is integrating hands-free voice control using Houndify, the company's natural language-understanding software. The company says Hound has a leg up on its competitors because it's able to parse meaning from far more complex questions. Now that SoundHound, the music app, is "Houndified," you can give voice commands by tapping the new Houndify button or by saying "OK Hound." SEE ALSO: Soundhound's new app wants to replace Siri and Google Now on your phone You can now tell SoundHound to add songs to your Spotify playlist.