Recently, Spotify released its annual “Spotify Wrapped.” For those of you who don’t know what this is (or have Apple Music… which is a whole other debate), each December, Spotify gives you an overview of what your music trends were for the year. They give you information like your top five songs and artists, top music genres, top podcasts and how many minutes of music you listened to throughout the year. This year they even added extra features like songs for certain scenes in a movie, if you were the main character and your top music “moods”. They even included a game to play of two truths and a lie about your music taste. This year’s Spotify Wrapped seemed to have more hype than it’s ever had – I even saw ads for it on TikTok.
A lot of people post their top artists and songs on their Instagram stories for their friends to see. This is the main reason why I love Spotify Wrapped. It’s nice to see an in-depth analysis about your music listening trends, but I think that it’s much more interesting to see the kind of music that your friends (or better yet, not your friends) are listening to. I personally think that music can be somewhat of a private thing for people as we sometimes we listen to songs that we don’t want others to know about late at night or when we’re driving down a back road. We have our go-to songs that get us in our feels or motivate us to lift weights at the gym – so I do think that it can be a personal thing. That’s why when I see my Instagram followers’ Spotify Wrapped summary, I think it provides a little sneak preview of what their life is actually like. For example, if someone’s top songs are worship songs, you can tell that they’re probably Christians or if someone listens to a lot of beat drops, you can infer that they might go to the gym a lot. Similarly, if they listen to a lot of sad music, there might be something going on in their life or if their top songs are trending on TiktTok- they might be addicted to TikTok! You can read into it a lot if you actually want to, but the system isn’t always perfect. For example, if you were a kindergarten teacher and had to play the wheels on the bus every day for you kids, obviously that song wouldn’t represent you if it showed up on your Spotify Wrapped.
So, if you have Spotify and haven’t taken a look at your Spotify Wrapped yet, I would definitely recommend doing it. I think that it would be even more fun to guess your top artist and song before you look at it and see if you were right afterwards. I think Spotify recognizes that music is something that brings everyone together, which is why I think they created Spotify Wrapped – so that we can celebrate our different tastes in music by sharing it with our friends.