Spotify Wrapped Szn Is Upon Us (2024 Remaster)
tidings of comfort and joywave to all!
Streaming’s greetings all, it was great meeting so many of you in person at the “Hularious” launch party for Hulu’s new comedy vertical last night.
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, Harden in retrotrade, and the X Games.
But for the relatively new, including the 31 (!) new subscribers over the past month:
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 Story, much to the chagrin / disinterest / fascination / irritation / collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of everyone who follows them.
Here are some of the 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 final one, which lists Your Top 5 Songs and Artists of 2024. Here were mine:
Tbh mine is a bit tainted, because I tend to listen to highly anticipated albums in their entirety a dozen times through when they come out.
Such as, for instance, the Warriors concept album that is seriously so good I had to write a 3,000+ word article about how I’d help market it last month:
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:
And:
While I’d like to think of Spotify Wrapped Szn 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 with basic music taste:
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/pooped 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 is on its release day while walking around campus, rather than interpreting manipulated 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 has been proven in real time by that trend on TikTok where strangers wearing headphones in Washington Square Park are asked what they’re listening to.
It’s this enchanting, weirdly addictive, slice-of-life insight into a heretofore 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 compelling was because it offered an insight about what a person consumes when they think no one is paying attention to them in broad daylight.
But at scale, this trend became a bit inauthentic.
The people being interviewed are more prepared these days, seemingly walking by the camera crew and dude with a microphone on purpose, in the hopes they get selected.
It’s hard not to feel similarly disillusioned about Spotify Wrapped.
Hell, one of the main reasons I haven’t shared my own Top 5 Artists/Songs on Instagram is because I’m embarrassed that 80% of my Top Songs are from an album that came out on October 18th, meaning I listened to it so many times in the first two weeks after it came out1, that they skyrocketed to the top of my playlist.
The other non-Warriors songs in my Top 15 are tracks by Brother Ali, a rapper with albinism, and a bunch of music we play pre-show and post-show at Stamptown.
Listening to Brother Ali in the year where I’m finally embracing my albinism, rather than constantly trying to hide my condition at all times has been extremely powerful.
Songs like “Forest Whitiker” and “Picket Fence” have legitimately moved me to tears.
And my top song, ’Ray Charles’ by Chiddy Bang, is the #1 seed because I freestyle rap to it in the shower nearly every morning, as it’s a direct inspiration on a new character I’m developing in light of all this acceptance, a rap persona called Steph Blurry2.
Point being - isn’t why I played these songs so many times far more interesting / revelatory of the year I had than me vinyl-signaling3 about my epic music taste?
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 Swifties 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 any single person – other than me – outsource their self-esteem to [Album Z] to get you through these past few months, or rely on ~this one lyric~ to provide a bit of solace in your day, or was it literally only me??
Because the alternative is unbearably lonely.
David Zucker is a digital marketing consultant based in New York City. A former analyst at TikTok, his unique, data-driven approach has catapulted the growth of his clients’ audiences. He works with an international client base of comedians and companies within the entertainment industry. He also happens to have oculocutaneous albinism, a rare genetic disorder which renders him legally blind. This condition offers him a unique perspective on both live and digital comedy, especially with respect to accessibility.
Spotify doesn’t include data from the current year’s November or December in the “annual” Wrapped, just the previous year’s. Evidently, we are already in Fiscal Year 2025 in Sweden.
But more on that another time.
And yes, I’m coining that term right now.
My fave thing about Spotify Wrapped stuff is it's actually real data. One of the few times people are posting things that reflect reality instead of whatever make believe meshugas we're all doing online the rest of the time. Spotify Wrapped: It's now who you want to be, it's who you are.