The notification drops a few minutes past 6 pm. “Your 2025 Wrapped is here.”Â
I pause my assignment, cross my fingers like I’m about to receive medical results, and open Spotify. The loading screen feels slower than my WiFi has ever been. First comes the neon slide: “You listened to 24,913 minutes this year.” Cute. Next: “You explored 184 genres.” Great, shows personality! Then the real boss level appears: “Your Top Artists.” My thumb slowly hovers over my screen, and I actually hold my breath. Because, in that split second, the question is not just “What did I listen to?” It’s “Is this okay to put on my story?”
Spotify Wrapped used to be a cute little end-of-the-year surprise. Now, it feels like a high-stakes personality quiz the whole internet can see. Every November, the same ritual begins: people frantically skip “embarrassing” songs, curate hyper-specific playlists, and pray that their top artist doesn’t ruin their aesthetic. Somewhere along the way, Wrapped stopped being a private report card on our listening habits and started feeling more like our marksheet pinned to a very public college noticeboard.
And honestly? Bollywood listeners have it pretty bad. If you grew up on Hindi film music, you know there is one man who lurks in every third playlist, every campus DJ set, every “just one song before we sleep, yaar” moment:Pritam. You are not trying to stan Pritam. You are just trying to live. But he’s behind half the songs that have ever been played in a moving vehicle in this country. Avoiding him in your Top 5 is like trying to avoid that one piece of clove in Krea biryani: the harder you try, the more determined it is to end up on your spoon anyway.Â
This year, I tried to fight back. Strategic skipping. “I’ll listen to this on YouTube instead.” “Noooo, please play indie music, I’m trying to cultivate an aesthetic.” For once, I actually succeeded: my Wrapped was Pritam-free. On paper, it was a win. Emotionally, it felt…ridiculous. Why was I proud that an algorithm no longer knew how often I cry to Yeh Dooriyan?Â
The thing is, Spotify Wrapped isn’t just data; it’s social currency, at this point. We don’t just look at our slides, we post them. Phoebe Bridgers equals “emotionally complex,” The Weeknd equals “main character at 2 am,” and an obscure indie band equals “I was here before they got cool.” Wrapped turns music taste into a soft launch of identity; it’s essentially “here’s who I’d like you to think I am.”
But here’s the plot twist: the songs we’re trying to hide are often the ones that say the most about us. The 2010s Bollywood heartbreak tracks, the brainrot dance numbers, that one song your parents played on every road trip (Lemon Tree by Fools Garden). Those are the cognitive time capsules. They’re messy, nostalgic, a tad embarrassing, and completely honest.
Maybe the problem isn’t that our Wrapped exposes us. Perhaps it’s that we’ve started treating that exposure as a performance review. What if next year’s goal isn’t to “fix” our Wrapped, but to let it be chaotic? Let Pritam sit next to Dominic Fike. Let him sit next to A.R. Rahman. Hell, let him even sit next to Charli xcx. Let your top song be the one you played 151 times (Silver Springs by Fleetwood Mac, the stats are real) during peak exam season because your brain refused to function without it. Let your listening history reflect your actual year, not the version of it you’d put on a Pinterest board.
Because at the end of the day, Spotify Wrapped is supposed to be a mirror, not a costume. So, when that “Top Artists” slide finally loads, and your heart drops for half a second, it’s just exposing how chaotically human your year actually was, right down to the fact that no matter how hard you tried to be niche, Pritam still crashed your party :)