by Mia Stachura
As displayed by the flood of Instagram Stories and TikTok Live discussions, Spotify has officially dropped its annual gift to all its listeners, paid membership or not. This gift, officially known as “Spotify Wrapped,” is a cutesy collection of our yearly music habits presented to us in a hyper-stylized package. Music and podcast listeners alike wait patiently all year for this feature to be released, some even holding a countdown as history shows that this unofficial holiday arrives on either the last week of November or first week of December.
During the earlier parts of the year, I often find myself thinking about how the music I listen to might reflect on my eventual Spotify Wrapped. If I find myself indulging in too much lawn-mowin’, dirt-road-lovin’ Y2K country hits while basking in the mid-July sun, I can’t help but have a joking thought of “I wonder if the algorithm will expose me in my ‘yeehaw’ era.” Country music is hardly something I seek out in my daily life, only when the UV index is high and the mood is right. What’s considered a passing thought has become a competitive sport for others. What I’ve unofficially coined as “music manipulation” has been a topic of discussion recently and I take issue with it. What is music manipulation, you may ask? It’s when users strategically play with their listening data by running certain playlists overnight or allowing specific artists to play silently on their devices while the user is occupied with activities other than listening to the music.
Before we can get into why this could be cause for concern, it’s important to understand how and why our own music data is collected and presented to us. Spotify captures its metrics by tracking the music, podcasts, and audiobooks we consume from the first of the year all the way through sometime mid-November. Spotify’s observation software is able to see what media we skip, replay, and even mark as “not interested.” Spotify itself has also cleared the air about what content is and is not counted toward our yearly Wrapped, stating that “Listening in Private Mode and utilizing features like Exclude from Taste Profile count toward your total time spent with Spotify, but they don’t shape your taste-based stories.” They then continue to say, “We also filter out background sounds like white noise, so your Wrapped reflects the real soundtrack of your year.”
Understanding this system is important because, for many users, the goal is no longer to see honesty in their post-able profile data. While this might seem harmless at first glance, the rise of Wrapped manipulation brings on a new set of problems that go far beyond bragging rights. At its core, the act of silent listening directly feeds into online behavior that I’ve noticed becoming much more prevalent in the world: the normalization of inauthenticity. Wrapped, in all its digital glory, is a direct reflection of our lives. It shows us how we fell in love with the opening band at the Twenty-One Pilots concert back in February and how that’s the only music we listened to for months. It shows how we suddenly got pulled into a new genre as we were handling heartbreak in October. Music hears us, and music heals us in ways that couldn’t even be explained by Sigmund Freud himself. By consciously switching around our taste profile with only the intention of curating a completely hand-crafted Spotify Wrapped, users have stripped this gift to merely data collection and a successful algorithm. And frankly, that’s where it begins to feel icky. A user’s top artists, proudly pasted on their social media, become less about who they are as a person and more about how they will be perceived by their followers and loyal story-watchers. All of a sudden, listening becomes performative. Listening becomes a task.
At the end of the day, your Spotify Wrapped is your Spotify Wrapped. Why not allow your top Spotify artists to be whoever carried you through your happiest days and even your darkest moments? That zydeco band with 10,000 monthly listeners that you only play in the shower could use your support much more than the 14-Grammy Award-winning artist that you play on mute just because you look more Gen-Z when their face shows up on your phone screen. This is my plea that for next year: let your Wrapped reflect the person who pressed play with their 2016 Ford Fiesta stereo on full blast and not the person you think your loyal story-likers want to see.
