The day is December 1st. Most people are usually getting ready for the holidays: putting up their Christmas tree, throwing lights around the outside of their house, or baking various arrays of holiday desserts.
I, however, am doing none of those things. Instead, I am awake at 8 a.m. watching my Spotify Wrapped. Once I watch my own, I post the things I deem interesting to my social media for others to see. The rest of the day is spent listening to my most played songs of that year, looking through everyone else’s social media posts about their Wrapped and trying to psychoanalyze each person whose music taste I see.
As you may have noticed, I love Spotify Wrapped. It’s an event that I wait impatiently for every year, and once it comes, I impatiently wait for another entire year before its return.
For those who don’t know, Spotify Wrapped is a marketing campaign put out by Spotify Music, showing the most played songs, artists, genres, and other statistics of a listener on the platform. A complex set of algorithms is used to generate a ‘show’ of sorts that reveals your top genres, top song, even top audio aura of music that you listen to. If you aren’t on Spotify and use a different platform like Amazon or Apple, then this day is a disappointing one.
I love music, I love data, and I love getting a peek into other people’s music tastes, which makes December 1st one of the best days of the year. Usually I am suspicious of algorithms and their ability to find any kind of information about anyone, but this is the one acceptable situation that I will happily deal with.
Every year, I am most excited to see what my most listened to song is. This is because I am known for finding a song I like and putting it on repeat over and over again. This makes my song count incredibly high, and this year was no exception. I listened to my top song on Spotify 452 times, which I was incredibly proud of (though some of my friends thought that this was slightly excessive).
Not only do I like looking at my own preferences, I like looking at others. I believe that a lot of someone’s personality can be figured out by the music that they listen to, which turns into a sleuth every holiday season. I also now have the chance to see who out there likes the same artists of songs that I do without asking, though I do usually ask any other time of the year.
Spotify Wrapped creates a day full of surprises and connections. As one who already doesn’t participate fully in the holiday season anyway (i.e. my family hasn’t put up a Christmas tree in two years…), I can say that Spotify Wrapped is the one thing you can see my full-fledged holiday spirit.
Check out my “Your Top Songs 2021” playlist, or listen to the top songs of Her Campus CU Boulder writers!