This piece was originally published for Tastemakers Music Magazine.
Congratulations, you were in the Top .5% of Ed Sheeran listeners this year! The neon-backed font seems to be both laughing and pitying you with the delivery of this news. You tap once more, hoping for something better to post. You just love to listen to We Don't Talk About Bruno (From "Encanto"). You streamed it 213 times in 2022! You groan and roll over, determined not to show a single soul this self-inflicted embarrassment. You swap over to Instagram and skim through the stories, where it seems every one of your friends is hyping up their own taste. The Smiths. Carly Rae Jepsen. Tyler the Creator. Japanese Breakfast. You resolve yourself to have a “better” or “cooler” Spotify Wrapped next year… whatever it takes!
As pitiful as it sounds, this is an all-too-common occurrence since the popularization of Spotify Wrapped over the recent years, a viral marketing campaign from the streaming giant that uses listening data to give users insight into their activity on the platform. The campaign uses a variety of metrics that track streams throughout the calendar year, calculating top songs, artists, and genres that a listener repeatedly returns to, as well as moods, recently discovered sounds, and more. The information is then presented in a graphic set of “slides” that inevitably end up plastered across every social media platform imaginable.
As music taste becomes more commodified into yet another standard used to judge each other on social media, many end up forcing themselves to aestheticize their own music taste to keep up. Users have started to create “corrective” playlists, titled things like “skewing my wrapped” or “spotify wrapped grind😭.” One such playlist description reads: “no one will give me aux if kanye is my top artist.” While the dig at Kanye is deservedly true, these playlists are just a few of thousands. Many of these are simply called “wrapped,” with clear intentions by a breadth of listeners to play on repeat throughout the year to game their own rankings for public perception reasons.
The Instagram-ification of music taste can only have negative impacts on personal wellbeing and on the music industry overall, right along with the forced glamorization and judgment of everything else in our lives. Spotify’s recap feature feeds into dynamics of narcissism and self-deprecation by giving this image-obsessed generation another comparison metric. Just like social media has led us to judge our bodies in comparison to his shirtless post, our social situation in comparison to her squad vacation, our side profile in comparison to their laughing candid, who’s to say that Wrapped’s encouraged comparisons of our music taste isn’t forcing new feelings of anxiety or self-denigration on all of us?
Even worse, much like similar discourse surrounding TikTok, the Wrapped feature has an inadvertent impact on the industry itself. Rather than reflecting the preferences of listeners, its calling-of-attention to trends and surging artists actually affects what’s popular by acting as free mass marketing. This combined with the fact that most Wrapped data is calculated by number of streams — meaning that the algorithm will naturally promote artists with shorter, quippy songs over longer, experimental pieces — is just another instance of the market stifling artists who subvert industry norms. The mass homogenization and watering-down of music taste, because everyone will listen to what social media says everyone else is listening to, is a shame for those invested in a music industry that highlights and encourages creative and innovative voices.
I’m proud to announce that I still occasionally listen to my freshman-year-of-high-school playlist that’s defined by Kelly Clarkson, The Spice Girls, and the original Broadway cast of Avenue Q. But I simultaneously love Black Country, New Road’s weirdo art rock album with 6-minute songs that debatably make no sense. These nuances and idiosyncrasies in taste should be celebrated, not stamped out by another big tech company’s data campaign. We should strive for a culture around Spotify Wrapped in its best form: a way to show off our creative or cringey or nostalgic musical inspirations, rather than another coolness checkpoint or a peer-pressure determinant of what’s “in” right now. My playlists are just fine.
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