by Joshua McGlaughlin

Spotify’s global marketing department head, Louisa Ferguson, recently compared the yearly release of Spotify Wrapped to the excitement of gifting at Christmas. A brave and bold statement, but perhaps not too far from the truth.

With billboards plastered across cities, countless memes, and over 574 million engagements, Spotify Wrapped has fully infiltrated global culture. Artists and users alike are drawn to the seasonal summary of their listening habits. From the top songs of the year to a disconcertingly high number of minutes, Spotify lays bare everything you did and didn’t want to know. However, it wasn’t always this popular. Let’s take a trip in the time machine.

We’re going back to the start…

Spotify pioneered their yearly musical concept in 2013 under the far less catchy (albeit extremely accurate) Year in Music. It was a more intimate experience, where you would receive a link to a playlist compiling your most listened songs for the year. In 2016, they coined the term ‘Wrapped’ for the first time, before 2017 saw a shift towards interactivity and personalised stats. Then, in 2019, a crucial design change was implemented – shareable stories: little graphics with satisfying colours and wavy borders. Since then, Spotify has continued developing their yearly summaries, including quirky new metrics such as Audio Aura in 2021, which visualises your music moods, or Sound Town in 2023, which matches your listening habits with a location elsewhere on Earth.

I wish that I could be like the cool kids…

Despite the jazzy new analyses in recent years, the shift to smaller, colourful, shareable bites of information is the most significant evolution of the interface. What was once an insular, private summation of musical preference has become a wide-spread, cultural barometer of personality and knowledge. Rather than being a celebration of variety, people compete over reductive metrics.

Another common duel is over who has the more niche listening habits. Oh, you haven’t listened to 1237 minutes of Chill Goblincore Mixes. Do better. Heaven forbid anyone catches you listening to Ed Sheeran over an Avantgarde Slavic Jazz Trio who only uses wood-working tools as instruments.

The anxiety attached to having a ‘bad’ Wrapped has even catalysed Spotify self-help articles, which include tips like playing a ‘cool’ playlist on silent when you are sleeping – AKA completely misrepresenting yourself to foster a persona on the internet. Others have taken to Photoshopping their summaries. One keen-eyed commenter asks: what is the font?

The rise of social media stories (even LinkedIn has them!) and the ever-increasing obsession with perception have only bolstered the cultural effects of Spotify Wrapped, particularly among younger generations. These effects aren’t always negative; Gen Z as a demographic are engaged, connected and global-minded, and little bites of information are an excellent way to share what you’ve been up to. In my case, lots of Steely Dan.

Equally, the incessant need to be validated threatens the sanctity of what should be a pleasurable, and often private, experience. Music is an incredible force for bringing communal joy (think of Sweet Caroline playing at a wedding), but it can also be a crucial buoy in times of secretive struggle. Spotify Wrapped doesn’t make that distinction and neither does social media.

While I may be writing from a narratological high horse, I can’t pretend that I’m immune to the alluring forces of Spotify Wrapped. What began as a curious insight into my listening habits has become an all-consuming measure of my identity. I can’t even remember what listening to music was like before it was wrapped up for me. One year I was so desperate for validation regarding the breadth of my musical knowledge, I worked out the number of times I listened to individual songs, dividing my ‘total minutes listened’ by my ‘total songs listened to’, multiplied by ‘average song length.’

Eventually I worked out I listened to each song an average of 1.5 times. Naturally, I was buoyed by the arrogant suavity of having wide-ranging listening habits and flexed that information amidst multiple group chats. That was, until I realised I had used arithmetic to analyse my music taste, as well as potentially revealing my deeply suppressed attention-span issues. Shame.

Every breath you take and every move you make…

Regardless of your opinion of the cultural impacts of Spotify Wrapped, within the neon-coloured package of the app lies a sinister, not-even-remotely-hidden present: constant surveillance. While other companies attempt to hide the incredible quantities of data they harvest from user activity, Spotify proudly presents it to you, almost as a favour, and we greedily accept the delicious reduction of our entire personality. It seems the pervasiveness of data harvesting is conveniently forgotten when displayed in pretty colours and with a ‘share’ button situated next to our opposable thumb.

There are other ethical issues inherent to the Spotify model too, such as the notorious under-paying of artists and the infamous over-paying of the CEO. Speaking of money, it is only fitting that the original concepts of Spotify Wrapped stories were created by an unpaid intern named Jewel Ham back in 2019, for which she received no credit and obviously no job.

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter…

So, what is the solution? Do we shun Spotify Wrapped for the identity-shaping, morally ambiguous data-tracker it is? Or do we embrace it as a fun little encapsulation of our musical adventures?

Is Gen Z perennially trapped in a maze of musical monotony? Or is the dopamine boost when seeing you’re in the top 1% of Steely Dan fans worth the price of constantly being observed?

I would give my response, but I have an automatically generated Spotify playlist called Egg Punk that is screaming for my attention, so I’ll have to leave that ethical quandary up to you.

Happy listening!

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Josh is currently studying writing and publishing at the University of Melbourne. He really does like Steely Dan.