Spotify Choked Tomato Growers
Tomato Production vs Spotify Monthly Active Users
As Spotify users grew, tomato production dropped. Agriculture was apparently outcompeted by algorithmic playlists. Every Discover Weekly is one fewer bruschetta.
“Streaming audio crowds out agricultural labor. The annotated lyrics are eating the farms.”
— Prof. Playlist Harvest, Ag-Tech Sociologist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of Tomato Production set against Spotify Monthly Active Users. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move inversely tightly enough to produce r ≈ 52% (negative). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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