Streaming’s greetings all,
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 stories, 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 2023:
Tbh mine is a bit tainted, a) because I tend to listen to highly anticipated albums in their entirety several times through when they come out and b) because I listened to “Revolting Children” from the Netflix release of Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical for like a week straight after watching the otherwise-meh movie in January.
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 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 reading some 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 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 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 these days, 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, one of the main reasons I didn’t share my own Top 5 Artists/Songs on Instagram is because I’m embarrassed that a song from the Netflix adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical is my second-most played song of 2023. I don’t want people to think I like, loooved the Netflix adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical1.
Although I will say, this song does fucking rip. Before the movie came out, a clip from it went viral on TikTok (mostly for the girl in the red hat’s dance moves), and it got me pumped for the release:
Hearing it now, in late November, I’m instantly transported back to that week in January where I listened to this song nonstop. I was trying to learn it by ear, and catch every clever turn of phrase without looking up the lyrics online. The music and lyrics were written by Tim Minchin, an Australian musical comedian who happens to be a wonderful lyricist. There’s clever wordplay, outstanding vocal performances, and a key change to top it all off. There’s also a lot of purposely mis-spelled words (“we can S-P-L how we like”, “N-O-R-T-Why?”, “she can take her hammer and S-H-U!!!” etc.), and they come at you fast, especially in the excerpt above. It was hard to decipher all this in real time, so I had to listen over and over again, all the while trying not to bang my head too hard as the bassist and harpsichord players go OFF in the background and the fat kid belts out riffs like his dessert depends on it.
Point being - isn’t why I played that song so many times far more interesting / revelatory of the year I had than me vinyl-signaling2 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.
I was disappointed by it, like everyone else!
And yes, I’m coining that term right now, brb…