Unwrapping Spotify Wrapped
The world’s biggest streaming platform is watching us. And we love it.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and Spotify Wrapped.
Every year we gather around the light and warmth of our screens and let Spotify tell us about ourselves. How old are we? Who is our favourite singer? What club do we belong to?
And through it, we share the pre-made visuals on our socials, giving free advertising to Spotify. We overanalyse our behaviours, often even before it’s Wrapped season. And we celebrate a major corporation tracking our every move, a thought that sends a shiver down our spine in every other context.
This year’s Wrapped feels even more like a sensitive subject, since the tides are turning against the platform, to say the least. Users and artists alike have been boycotting the platform, so maybe this year your profile will be slightly less flooded with listener statistics. Maybe.
We’re excited about Spotify tracking our every play. Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, tells WIRED that “Spotify has done an amazing job of marketing surveillance as fun and getting people to not only participate in their own surveillance but celebrate it and share it and brag about it to the world.”
And man, do we participate. In 2024 alone, the feature engaged 245 million users. Although there are no specific numbers public for how many people shared their statistics, all it takes is 20 minutes on Instagram to see all your friends sharing their top artists, albums, genres, and songs.
“Spotify has done an amazing job of marketing surveillance as fun and getting people to not only participate in their own surveillance but celebrate it and share it and brag about it to the world.”
On top of that, as we’ve become painfully aware of this year, Spotify is a corporation before anything else. Us sharing our Spotify Wrapped is giving free them free advertising. In the very words of Alex Bodman, Spotify’s vice president and global executive creative director, “Suddenly we started to realise that this was an incredible way to get our passionate users to shout from the rooftops around the brand”.
But what I often think about is the performance of it. With the rise of social media, the lines between our private and public lives are blurred, and this is purely another symptom of that. But how much does that matter to us? Can it change what we listen to at all?
When people are observed, we change our behaviour (much to the plight of many behavioural experimenters). So as the feature gains popularity every year, some part of our subconscious knows that this data is being tracked and will be over-simplified and shared with us at the end of the year.
Suddenly, music listening feels like a test, and we need to carefully choose our music so we get a good score at the end of the year (lots of minutes, obscure artists and genres, top 0.001% of an artist’s fanbase).
But this might change. As we’ve become more disillusioned with Spotify, it could be possible that sharing Spotify Wrapped becomes *gasp* cringe.
To many, music is a sacred thing. As I repeatedly claim, it’s inherent to the human experience and as old as humanity itself. But it’s becoming yet another overly curated aspect of ourselves. What started as intimate moments of refuge, connection, vulnerability, and honesty are now becoming observed, measured, and sold.
In the words of Kelly Pau for Vox, "Our online selves are still an extension of ourselves; it’s not not a version of personhood. At the same time, it’s a version that is inherently manufactured and performative." It’s a commodification of not just music itself but our listening habits.
“Our online selves are still an extension of ourselves; it’s not not a version of personhood. At the same time, it’s a version that is inherently manufactured and performative.”
And it works. Every year, we flood our stories with our minutes listened, top artists, and top songs. And we anxiously wait to see our friends’ numbers. We revisit our year in music, drawing conclusions about ourselves and wonder about the implications of MAYHEM being our top album (definitely not talking about myself here….). I take every result way too personally, as if being faced with my own behaviour and having to draw some sort of conclusion from it. An entire year of enjoyment, quantified.
In my time of writing, we’re in the limbo of Spotify Wrapped. It’s out, and there’s still a whole month until the new year. So when we’ve gotten so used to being tracked all the time, and perhaps subconsciously controlling our listening because we know we’re being observed, what do we do when we’re not?
As I left my house today, I chose what music to play. I felt a weird freedom I embarrassingly haven’t felt in months: for the first time all year, my listening behaviour won’t be presented to me. Yes, it’s still being tracked, but I’ll never have to come face-to-face with it, and neither will any of my friends.
So I found myself asking what I actually wanted to listen to. Now that no one will know what I’m playing, what do I like? It feels superficial to find myself thinking these things, even a bit pathetic, but with the cultural chokehold that this feature has on its millions of listeners (and their Instagram stories), I would argue more people ask themselves these questions than not.
We’ve lost the ability to let something just be. If something isn’t tracked, it doesn’t count. We track our movies on Letterboxd, our books on Goodreads, our workouts, our daily habits, our calorie intake, our menstrual cycles, and now, our music.
So what happens when we stop? And when something is so deeply embedded in our daily habits, how do we tear ourselves away from it?
Spotify Wrapped blurs the lines between private and public enjoyment of music. It’s digging its way into our music choices, mining our data, and using us for free advertising.
It just shows us that although we talk a lot about not wanting to be tracked by major companies, if it’s presented to us in a visually pleasing way, we’re very quick to accept it. And as Spotify faces more rage, and we think more critically about our consumption habits, where do we go from here?
