It makes me wistful for an earlier internet. Instead of starting conversations about our favourite music, Spotify Wrapped cuts them short, framing them in terms that mean very little and that stymie further discussion – Adele’s your number two? She’s my number three! Like so much of social media, it’s a broadcast claiming to be a dialogue. The number of plays wouldn’t have told us nearly so much. My most recent friendship was cemented when we found out that we had both once cried to Fight Night by Migos. The last dinner I had with my family, we named songs that had whistle solos, parentheses in the title or – the greatest challenge of all – were made after 1998 and which my dad might possibly like. Mainstream as my tastes may be, I take great pleasure in debating with friends – in highly specific and sometimes alienating detail – questions like which is the funniest Wings song, how we’d reorder our favourite albums, what makes one outro or intro or guitar solo great and another self-indulgent. But I believe this gamification of music comes at the cost of opportunities for actually connecting over it – one of my lifelong pleasures. Is being in the top 1% a point of pride, or a mark of monomania? What is listening time really a measure of, anyway?Īs a marketing blog wrote approvingly of Wrapped: the “sense of competition and achievement” motivates people to use Spotify for longer. Wrapped, likewise, presents listening to music in terms of scale: top five songs, top artists, top genres, total listening time, even which percentile of an artist’s fans you’re in. The platform has already cemented music as a numbers game: witness how streaming-savvy Drake can have the biggest album in the world without any ubiquitous hits, and how global fan armies strategise to drive singles up the charts. Neither are musical memories to cherish – but it’s this kind of functional engagement that Spotify recognises and, with Wrapped, rewards. Sometimes the numbers are so sweeping or skewed as to be meaningless: Call Me Maybe was in my most-played songs last year because I wrote about its 10th anniversary, and this year there will be Blinding Lights again (the most-streamed song in the world in 2020), because I sometimes listen to it on single-song repeat to motivate me to meet a deadline. I’m not being a snob – I was a late-in-life One Directioner – but often what Wrapped claims to uncover is obvious to the individual, and unedifying for their friends and followers. I see the flattening effect, that feedback loop, on display every year in Spotify Wrapped posts celebrating the same handful of artists and songs. It has never been easier to expand our musical horizons – yet many of us, conspicuously, don’t. Without denying our agency, I think we can routinely underestimate the influence of platform design on our decisions and behaviours. (Lately: a destabilising one-two punch of the new one from Mitski and Every 1’s a Winner by Hot Chocolate.) And at the end of the year, Spotify packages it up and gives it back to me, Wrapped – like a present so obvious you have to pretend you’ve not got four of them already. But more often I bang on my playlist – dating back to July 2017 – of 1,107 “liked songs” and listen to the most recent additions. If I’m feeling adventurous, I might try one that the algorithm has deemed to be similar. I don’t know whether it’s my own failure of initiative and imagination, or one of product design and the paradox of choice, but when I open up the app each morning I mostly go with Spotify’s flow: I listen to albums I’ve recently been listening to and artists I already know I like. Nevertheless, every year, I get the sense of my listening habits becoming increasingly tightly wound – into six daily mixes: my six modes – and increasingly like everyone else’s. After 10 years as a Spotify subscriber, it’s my longest-ever relationship, and I’ve never considered giving it up. As someone who used to spend hours painstakingly tending to her iTunes music library, who felt a gap in her Last.fm history like an archival omission, I am exactly the sort of pedant who should be all for Spotify Wrapped – and yet I find it banal and depressing. This time last year it led to a 21% surge in downloads of Spotify’s mobile app as users rushed to share their numbers on social media. Either way, since it began in 2016, Wrapped has become as anticipated as Black Friday a new tradition in corporate Christmas. Others parade their stats like a badge of honour (“hours spent listening to Post Malone”). Some users take it in that spirit, taking stock and finalising their pandemic playlist for posterity.
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