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Nearly Everyone Has More Legs Than Average, And The Mode Explains Why

16 min readOct 24, 2026

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Anime student leaping across a gym to split a glowing two-humped curve into two crowds of gym-goers, a cartoon about the mode in statistics
One curve, two crowds, and the average that finally noticed.

Every December, Spotify hands you a statistics result and you post it on Instagram.

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Your Wrapped “top songs” list is ranked by the total number of listens, where a listen counts once a song plays for more than 30 seconds. Count everything, pick the one that turns up most. In statistics that has a name. It’s the mode, the most common value in a pile of data, and it might be the only statistic people screenshot on purpose.

Spotify Wrapped screen listing a user's top five songs by number of plays, an everyday example of the mode in statistics
The yearly statistics lesson nobody complains about. Your top song is just your mode.

It can also go badly wrong. In December 2024 the Washington Post wrote about parents whose Wrapped had been taken over by their kids. One dad’s top artist was Elmo. The next year it was the singer from Frozen. In September 2026, Spotify finally added a setting that keeps kids’ and family music out of your taste profile.

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The maths was correct. It just counted everyone holding the phone.

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I write about machine learning, deep learning, and statistics with Python, making complex ideas ridiculously clear.

Data Science Collective
Data Science Collective

Published in Data Science Collective

Advice, insights, and ideas from the Medium data science community