Spotify Wrapped season is upon us.

tidings of comfort and joywave to all!

Streaming’s greetings all, and happy fourth night of Hanukkah to those celebrating – or, as Smokey Robinson called it in this extremely public Cameo, “cha-noo-kah!”.

Today’s subject matter is the annual social media trend that is Spotify Wrapped.

Longtime readers know there are only four seasons, at least as far as this mailing list is concerned: Spotify Wrapped, cuffing szn, mercury in retrograde, and the X Games.

But for the relatively new, including the 6 (!) new subscribers from the past week:

Spotify Wrapped Szn (n) an annual, week-long stretch in early December during which hyperactive Spotify users proudly share their personalized listening data from the past year to their Instagram stories, much to the chagrin / disinterest / fascination / irritation / collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of everyone who follows them.

And here are some of the types of insights you’ll see when tapping through your personalized Year in Review wrap-up, set to the tune of your most played songs:

The one graphic most people share to their Instagram story is the one that lists Your Top 5 Songs and Artists of the Year. For instance:

Tbh mine is a bit tainted, a) because the Donda album cover is just a black square, and b) because I accidentally left an instrumental of “The Motto” by Drake on loop for a whole day when I was at my friends’ house watching the Big Ten championship in March (I was using it for this TikTok), so that’s my #2 song, but you get the picture.

My personal favorite part of #SpotifyWrappedSzn is using pudding.cool’s snarky A.I. music listener analysis bot that judges how bad your Spotify is. For example:

While I’d like to think of Spotify Wrapped Season as a time for reminiscence, reflection, and running a mile in someone else’s AirPods, it’s really a time for rolling your eyes, silently judging your peers, and making fun of people, like this:

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There was an /r/AskReddit thread I once read ~10 years ago that asked something like, “if you could see any stat displayed above people’s heads, what would it be and why?”

Some answers were silly, like how many times a person had peed/pooed their pants in public. Others were a combination of beautiful and frightening, like their degrees of separation from you, or how many times you’d already encountered each other.

Back then – in the Pre-Snap Story era – my answer would have been to see the album cover / song title of whatever anyone wearing headphones was currently listening to.

How much more fascinating would people-watching at a busy train stop or airport be? And wouldn’t it be neat to see exactly how popular an album was on its release day while walking around campus, rather than analyzing vague streaming stats?

With the benefit of hindsight, however, public-facing listening trends like Spotify Wrapped have made it abundantly clear that I would need to add the following caveat:

The people in this admittedly voyeuristic hypothetical cannot know that their listening habits are on display, because it would completely change what they listen to.

This fear is being proven in real time by that trend on TikTok where strangers wearing headphones on busy city streets or college campuses are asked what they’re listening to. It’s this enchanting, weirdly addictive, slice-of-life insight into a hitherto private area of self-expression: what are these total strangers, about whom you know nothing, using at this exact moment in time as their soundtrack for, “My Life: The Movie”?

You’ll see everything from an elderly man listening to a song his late son wrote, to a girl in athleisure listening to some Baroque piece in preparation for her cello recital.

The main reason this trend was so interesting is because it offered an insight about what a person consumes when they think no one is watching, even in broad daylight.

But at scale, this trend has become a bit inauthentic.

The people being interviewed are more prepared now, seemingly walking by the camera crew and guy with a microphone on purpose, in the hopes they get selected.

It’s hard not to feel similarly disillusioned about Spotify Wrapped.

Hell, the main reason I didn’t share my own Top 5 Artists/Songs on Instagram is because I’m embarrassed a Drake instrumental is my 2nd-most played song of 2021.

I don’t want people to think I like, looove Drake’s beats.

But isn’t the story behind why I played that song so many times far more interesting / revelatory of the year I had than me “vinyl-signaling” about my epic music taste? (and yes, I’m coining that term right now, brb…)

So what is it, then, that compels so many people to share these insights to a largely uninterested crowd?

I think the criticism of it being “performative” is lazy.

Any social media post is performative, full stop. Any story, be it on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Fleets (R.I.P.), LinkedIn Stories (R.I.P.), always has a subtext.

Granted, that subtext is usually some variation of, “my parents have money!”, but I actually think Spotify Wrapped posts are less self-centered than they initially appear.

Maybe I’m giving too many Tame Impala fans the benefit of the doubt, but I think a lot of the subtext to this year’s Spotify Wrapped posting barrage is:

Did anyone else out there get through this absolutely bonkers year in part because they listened to [Song X] a hundred and fifty times?? Did anyone else also embody [Artist Y]’s mindset during any portion of the craziest period of the century?? Did any single person – other than me – outsource their self-esteem to [Album Z] to get you through the day, or rely on ~this one lyric~ to validate your hardships this winter, or was it literally only me??

Because the alternative is unbearably lonely.