The beginning of December means one thing for music lovers: your Spotify Wrapped gets released. It’s a moment of mixed pride and embarrassment as you relive your year through the music that got you through the highs and the lows. It’s a day when you get to share how (not) cool your music taste is, and, personally, I love Spotify Wrapped. I think it’s such a fun idea to be able to see what you and all of your friends have been enjoying. Every year, Spotify mixes it up a bit and includes different categories. There are the staples like top song and artist, but sometimes other things get included, like the mood or how your stats compare to other Spotify users. If I were making Spotify Wrapped, these are the five bonus categories I would want to include:
Disclaimer: I have no idea what it takes to make the algorithms that go into Spotify Wrapped, I’m just an opinionated consumer.
- What song you listened to the most times in a row
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We have all had those nights where a song just hits you the right way and you put it on repeat for three hours. I think this category would really expose some things about myself in a fun way. Did I listen to “Better than Revenge” 17 times on April 20th? I want to know! This was actually inspired by a billboard campaign Spotify ran a few years ago that revealed that someone listened to “Sorry” by Justin Bieber 42 times on Valentine’s Day.
- What song you skipped the most times
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I’m that person that makes a playlist and puts a song I don’t like that much in it, only to skip it every time it comes on. I could just remove it from my playlist, but I don’t. As much as I enjoy seeing all the songs I absolutely loved this year, I think it would be really funny to see which songs I consistently get 10 seconds into, then decide I’ve had enough.
- What new artist you started loving
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There are so many of my favorite artists that I don’t remember when I started listening to. It just feels like I have always adored them. I would love a category that told you what artist you discovered that year that jumped the rankings to become one of your top played of the year.
- Contextualizing your listening time
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Scrolling through Instagram stories, I see people who had 10,000 minutes of listening and people who had 100,000 minutes. I always end up getting out my calculator to convert this to hours and days because these numbers mean nothing to me. I think it would be really cool if Spotify gave you a time comparison. Something along the lines of “You could have walked across the United States in this amount of time,” or “This is the same amount of minutes it takes for someone to learn a new language.”
- What song you forgot about
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Every year, there is one song in my Wrapped that I was obsessed with in January that completely sways my top five most played songs. I think a great way to highlight this would be to have a category along the lines of “You listened to this song 54 times this year…but haven’t played it since June 7th!” This way you can reconnect with those songs you loved but haven’t played in a while. After all, reconnecting with the music you used to love is what Wrapped is all about!