i,i is the latest album from Bon Iver and, aside from waging war on upper-case letters and spacing, it has been given the visualiser treatment in partnership with Spotify.

Drawing on ASCII art, the Viisualiizer fills the screen with an “i,i,i,i,i,i,i,i…” sequence almost to the point of inducing a headache. It then morphs into an ASCII globe spinning before zooming in on the country that is playing the album most at that precise moment.

When music:)ally tested it, Germany was the trending country based on Spotify play data. It gave the date and time as well as the number of people playing it (1,936,783 when we checked, with over 3.5m listening hours clocked up so far). It also showed that the trending track on the album was ‘Naeem’ and it was accessible via a player button in the bottom left of the screen.

“Even though distilling my mind and heading to the cabin 12 years ago was vital, SHARING is the thing now,” said Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon in a suitably chewy statement. “Sharing and building things without holding on to the concept of authorship is the way. Our music is not ‘my’ music. In fact it never is, for anyone, and that is what i,i represents and how we worked to craft the ‘Viisualiizer’ experience with Spotify.”

There are echoes here of the heatmap The Orchard/Wayward Creative made for the latest Skepta album, which showed where it was being played around the world on its week of release.

What is interesting here is that, for a long time, play data was just something marketing people and accounting teams concerned themselves with; but it is now being turned into an actual part of the marketing by making it a consumer-facing part of campaigns. What’s next? The gamification of royalty splits?