Spotify Wrapped Dropped... Blah... Blah...
Here we go again.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if the UnitedHealth CEO saw his Spotify Wrapped, realized he was in the top 5% of Mumford and Sons listeners, and was so ashamed that he hired someone to kill him. Then, during the autopsy, the first responders saw his phone flash: “You spent 525,600 minutes denying healthcare to people in need!” On a lighter note, Zach Bryan was my top artist of the year, as I racked up 635 minutes jamming out to him and wound up in his top .5% of listeners; for comparison, my girlfriend listened to over 10,000 minutes of Taylor Swift and was in her top .5% of cult followers listeners. The stats behind all our results are a little skewed, as the window for your streams to be included spans from January 1 through Halloween, which I assume is to accommodate people who listen to Christmas music.
It shouldn’t be a strange thing to post about music—like, really get after it, like share every aspect of your Spotify Wrapped on your IG stories—and I suppose on the merits it isn’t. Many of my friends and coworkers and people I met at a bar once, for their part and to their credit, are never self-conscious about it; they really do care about Coldplay and Noah Kahan, so this is a very natural way for them to post and be. I am less this way, both because I care about sharing my personal life so much less and because social media is something I actively try to keep at arm’s length. So it was strange, both in writing a Spotify-heavy newsletter and lurking through all these attendant posts, to enjoy partaking in this annual tradition of recapping my listening habits and peering into the musical sensibilities of people in my orbit. Can you be highly interested in something that you’re pretty sure you don’t entirely like? Given how much I have written about American politics, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the answer is yes. Also, people will bitch about how nobody cares about your Spotify Wrapped and then post screenshots of their Strava running routes.
Last year’s iteration yielded which city summarizes your musical taste, and seemingly everyone I knew got Burlington, which is where they put all the cluster C white people. I got Boulder, CO, so I guess I’m more insufferable than I realized. This year, Spotify divided your year into eras, and receiving a phrase like “November was your Hacker Vogue Acidhouse Synthdream Haze Turbofolk Era with artists like Ice Spice and it’s giving Bad Bitch vibes” is a truly undignified harbinger of AI slop at critical mass. This was accompanied by a creepy AI podcast, and its only purpose/utility seemed to be to exist solely as a locus for a vibe contagion. I was taken aback by the two hosts laughing and talking over each other. My addiction to Sigur Rós may have broken their model as it was a wild and bumpy ride through hearing them horribly butcher titles like “Hvalir í útrýmingarhættu.” There were some other queasy disappointments, as I also listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the pause after the exclamation mark made all the banter sound goofy.
Given the hubbub every year around Wrapped, it does warrant consideration of what it would look like if other apps called you out like Spotify:
You creeped your ex’s Instagram for 24 days in a row in June. You’re in your Incel Lurker Cucklord Bikini Fapping Thirst Trapped Joe Goldberg Doritosmaxxing phase and we’re here for it.
You spent $475 on oat milk lattes this year. This could’ve paid off exactly 0.000000002% of your student loan or accounted for 0.000000005% of a down payment on a starter home, assuming BlackRock didn’t outbid you for it by $1 million. Hope all those Starbies runs were worth it, piggie!
You were ghosted 5 times from January to April. Maybe you shouldn’t open with, “AYO MA! What’s your farts smell like?”
You used Uber Eats to order in 23 times even though your apartment is literally a floor above Chipotle. You still requested door-to-door delivery, you insisted they use their e-bike for timely arrival, and you tip 5% repeatedly without fail.
Anyway, let me know in the comments what your top artists/songs were and how you feel about them.
There are two restaraunts in the same lot as my apartment building and I spent all summer ordering pizza online so I feel personally attacked by that last one. 😆 🤣
My wrapped holds absolutely zero surprises for me or anyone else. My top band was We Are Scientists by a considerable margin (35,849 minutes) followed by Black Honey, Royel Otis, Bad Nerves and The Libertines. I’ve seen all of those live at least twice this year so it’s a sensible list.
My top 5 songs were all We Are Scientists too (no shame there) but I did apparently listen to 2,911 different artists so there was a lot of new discovery too.
I love all the stats - and seeing everyone else’s although this year definitely felt lacklustre. I would also add that I back up my listening with physical purchases of the music I love. I want those bands to actually make some money!