Spotify Wrapped and the datafication of music taste 

‘Tis the season of everyone’s favorite end-of-year holiday: the Spotify Wrapped release date. This viral data-based marketing campaign gives users an annual summary of their personal music listening habits on the app, packaged in a shareable social media story format. Spotify’s 626 million monthly users look forward to Wrapped with more anticipation every year. Spotify Wrapped is shrouded with so much excitement that it’s easy to forget it is a giant advertisement to attract more consumers to the platform, rooted in extensive amounts of personal data. At the same time, it has fundamentally altered the way we interact with music, turning it into a numbers game and a means of displaying our individual identities more than ever before. The goal of streaming music becomes to show that we were in the top 1% of an artist’s listeners or to tout our 200,000 minutes of listening. Music becomes a constant hum of tunes in the background and a form of social capital, rather than an artistic work to actively appreciate and connect over. The implications of this go far beyond our phone screens.  

Since the launch of Spotify Wrapped in 2015, music data analysis has become so popular that many turn to third-party services available year-round like Receiptify, Stats.fm and the AI-powered Spotify Bedroom for an aestheticized picture of their listening habits. Whether consciously or not, song streams become like collectible tokens to evidence our devotion to certain genres, artists, or music-listening as a whole. While music tastes have always been a component of identity, platforms like Spotify now facilitate and capitalize off this tendency with Wrapped and other features.  

Illustration by Sarah Chantres/The Daily Campus

This speaks volumes to how our generation understands our identities through commodified forms, algorithms and what we consider to be “our” digital data (whose actual ownership rights are ambiguous to say the least). Not only do we enjoy seeing how various arrangements of personal digital data align with our identities, but we expect it. We take credit for the unique flavor of absurdity on our social media algorithms. We define ourselves in terms of neatly defined, trendy and marketable labels like e-boys, coquette girls or Swifties. We embrace algorithms and personal data analysis without questioning the sheer volume of information being collected and stored by companies like Spotify, which faces even less scrutiny than many other tech platforms.  

Yet there comes a point where one wonders whether they really are responsible for that Daylist titled, “90s divorced dad rock post-grunge Thursday evening,” or whether the algorithm has taken liberties in interpreting our listening profiles to keep us engaged. Spotify’s comically AI-based hyper-individualized playlists—another marketing tactic—and personalized new music algorithms may really be sending us down less diverse paths of music. Instead of shaping the algorithm, the algorithm shapes us.  

Why do these individualized social media algorithms and stylized regurgitations of our data exist? To attract our attention as media consumers, and with our attention, our money in the form of subscriptions. As we use Spotify’s services, we accumulate our self-made and platform-generated playlists, lists of Liked Songs, following/follower account and, naturally, a personal attachment to our digital music library. It is not easy to cancel subscriptions and migrate this near-and-dear music data to other platforms, and it’s even harder to build a physical collection of CDs or records. Campaigns like Spotify Wrapped encourage us to bundle our music-listening onto one platform so that it will be accounted for through data, monopolizing our listening. In Spotify’s words, “Wrapped or it didn’t happen.” 

We are also further advertising on social media, which populates the platform with new musicians and listeners. We are participating in and co-creating this cultural phenomenon that deliberately leaves non-Spotify users experiencing FOMO. This social pressure draws more people to Spotify, even if only for the free, ad-based plan. Indeed, Spotify saw a 21% increase in downloads during the first week of December 2020, according to Apptopia.  

Furthermore, listeners do the labor of urging new artists to put their music on a large streaming platform like Spotify or Apple Music. This makes it easier for listeners to continue to congregate their music onto a singular platform but leaves the average artist with virtually no room to negotiate the royalites and terms set by these billion-dollar companies.  

If you are like me, this might inspire you to turn some of your attention and money away from streaming giants like Spotify. Perhaps you also have an inherited collection of CDs you could listen to. Or maybe you’d like to tune into WHUS in the car to hear someone deejaying songs of political protest. Though you can still enjoy your Spotify Wrapped, it’s worth thinking critically about how you’re listening to music as Spotify continues dominating the market and expands data collecting practices. 

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