After 1,000+ rides on my Peloton bike, I started noticing the same songs and artists showing up over and over again.
There are entire genres with endless rides, while others barely seem to exist. As someone who'd happily trade a few pop punk rides for some actual punk, I started wondering whether the data backed up what I was hearing.
So I did what any normal person would do and started digging into it.
At first, I mostly wanted to answer a few questions. How repetitive is the catalog really? Which instructors branch out the most? Which themes lean on the same handful of songs? And where are the great tracks nobody seems to be playing?
That turned into this project. Which might be nothing. Or I might learn something. I dunno. I think it's fun though.
Workout mix
- Cycling1,073 workouts · 96%
- Strength29 workouts · 3%
- Stretching19 workouts · 2%
1,121 total workouts since joining Peloton in 2021 -- pulled straight from my own account.
How far back does it go?
Every class the scraper has imported from Peloton's on-demand library. There's no cutoff: it walks the library from newest to oldest until Peloton has nothing older.
| Year | Classes | Split by discipline |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 3 | |
| 2019 | 124 | |
| 2020 | 1,091 | |
| 2021 | 9,006 | |
| 2022 | 10,258 | |
| 2023 | 10,611 | |
| 2024 | 10,700 | |
| 2025 | 10,279 | |
| 2026so far | 8,658 |
| Discipline | Classes | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Biking | 21,831 | Nov 2018 |
| Strength | 11,321 | Oct 2018 |
| Running | 9,646 | May 2019 |
| Yoga | 7,279 | Jun 2019 |
| Walking | 3,477 | Jul 2020 |
| Meditation | 2,740 | Nov 2019 |
| Stretching | 2,425 | May 2019 |
| Cardio | 1,232 | Mar 2020 |
| Pilates | 779 | Dec 2020 |
The oldest class on file is 10 min Core Strength with Emma Lovewell, aired October 5, 2018 (strength).
Wait, Peloton already built this?
Well... sort of.
While digging into how Peloton actually picks music for classes, I found this article, which sent me down a pretty great rabbit hole.
Apparently Peloton has a Head of Music, five music supervisors who work with specific instructors, and an internal tool called Crescendo that lets instructors search more than a million licensed songs by things like BPM and duration.
They reportedly bought a startup in 2018 just to build it.
I have a scraper and an unreasonable amount of curiosity about why certain songs keep showing up.
| Category | Crescendo | This site |
|---|---|---|
| Built by | A startup Peloton bought in 2018 | One guy after work |
| Song library | 1,000,000+ licensed tracks | Whatever has already shown up in a class |
| Searches by | BPM and duration | “Wait, didn't they just play this?” |
| The team | A Head of Music and five music supervisors | Me and a Peloton bike |
| Knows a song's tempo | Yes | Absolutely not |
| Has opinions about punk | Unclear | Unfortunately, many |
So is Crescendo better than this site?
Almost definitely. They have a million songs and an actual music department.
But I'm pretty confident Crescendo does not have a dashboard whose primary purpose is discovering that an instructor has played the same song 47 times.
So we each have our strengths.
Really, the two tools are answering completely different questions. Crescendo helps instructors find music that fits the ride they're building.
This site looks backward and asks: what are instructors actually playing, what do they keep coming back to, and what somehow never gets played at all?
“They choose their own. We don't promote anything, musically speaking.”
And honestly, that might be my favorite part.
The music supervisors are there to help, but instructors still choose their own music. So when the same songs keep popping up, it's probably not some mysterious Peloton algorithm stuck in a loop.
It's just people having favorites.
Which makes this whole thing way more interesting.
At its core, this site is really just a very elaborate way of looking at instructor taste at scale. And, every once in a while, wondering whether that taste could use just a tiny bit more punk.
One other fun detail from the article: it cites a Goldman Sachs estimate that Peloton pays around 3.1 cents per stream, compared with roughly 0.35 cents on Spotify. So the next time you hear the same song for the hundredth time, at least somebody is getting paid. Read the full article.
I'm a software engineer by trade -- here's what this site is actually built on.
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQL
- Solid Queue
- Solid Cache
- Solid Cable
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Tailwind CSS
- shadcn/ui
- ActionCable
- Active Storage
- Kamal
- Docker
- Last.fm's API