My own hipsterdom aside, I always get excited when Spotify shows me back to myself in the form of raw listening data. I'm a huge music listener (if that wasn't abundantly clear) — I was in the top 92% of Spotify users this year when it came to volume, according to Wrapped. What can I say, I love music, and the ease of access provided by Spotify's model gels perfectly with my no-silence-ever lifestyle.
Spotify Wrapped Day evokes both
excitement and
eyerolls (and then
eyerolls at the eyerolls), reactions that all work to solidify the ritual and its platform as an institution. From a marketing strategy standpoint, Wrapped is executed brilliantly. Asking friends to weigh in on your two truths and a lie? Different color schemes to accommodate each user's brand and aesthetic? Share buttons on every page? All easy and engaging ways to incentivize social sharing. I even saw a few Apple Music users post sad, colorless screengrabs to keep up with the tide of popular discourse. The complainers further fuel the fire—because even if you're talking about how annoying Spotify Wrapped is, you're still talking about Spotify Wrapped, and the old adage goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Like many good ideas in digital media workplaces are,
the Spotify Wrapped concept, as well as
this year's "aura" feature, were first created by Black women who have remained uncredited and not properly compensated. Whenever you see a large-scale success of an initiative by a digital media company (or…really any kind of company), you can be reasonably sure that someone's being exploited. In this case, it was the intellectual property of
Jewel Ham and
Toni Ojo. And in other cases…
Spotify still pays artists' labels fractions of a penny per stream, which disproportionately affects independent and lesser known artists' ability to make a living as working musicians. For example, five million streams of Billie's latest single in the first week likely nets her label around $15k, while the ~700,000 listens on
Emma Ruth Rundle's sonic masterpiece "Hand of God" have likely netted her label around $2000 since its release in 2016. (Buy music and merchandise directly from the smallest artist on your top 100 playlist challenge!!)
Copywriters near and far cringed in unison as we read the feature's notoriously corny Zoomerspeak and
appropriated AAVE promo copy (
skewered masterfully by this NSFW Tweet), which joylessly recited context-collapsed turns of phrase popularized on the Internet this year as they do every year. The line "You deserve a playlist as long as your skincare routine" sounds like it was written by an alien intern doing a semester abroad in Modern Human Studies with a minor in Internet Subcultures. Good marketing copy brings people in on your thing by making them feel seen, understood, and aligned with you. If it's overwrought, people will notice—especially if they already love your offering, as in Spotify's case. Less is more!
I heard from a few friends this year that as their app use habits have changed, their Spotify Wrapped is really just their My Workout Playlist Wrapped. This was the case for my partner Kalyn, whose favorite bands are Pavement and Wilco, and whose Wrapped suggested WAP as their movie soundtrack opener. (I curate their workout playlists, so that's really on me.)
That's one thing about Spotify Wrapped that interests me: what do we do when we don't like the results. How do we participate in the compulsory sharing when the data shows the truth of our listening habits, and it doesn't align with our online persona? We can opt out, we can talk trash, we can share our most embarrassing bits to our close friends only (hey 👋🏻), or we can present the truth with an ironic slant:
look at how bad my taste is. We might come off tasteless, but we're also being earnest and self-aware—arguably less cringey than bragging about
how long we've been listening to the world's biggest pop star.
So, artists and small businesses, should you share your Wrapped next year? If you're running a one-person social media rodeo and your listening habits are consistent with your brand's identity (or you can spin them in a way that is), sharing your Spotify Wrapped is a great way to connect with your audience. More specifically, it's a great way to get your audience to feel connected to you. If you're afraid of losing followers, don't sweat it too much—losing non-engaged followers is often a good thing. Let your
Swiftie flag fly and let the haters see themselves out. If you're representing a big brand or business, though, I might skip it in favor of not seeming disingenuous (
corporations are not people, my friend, and your audience knows this).
I think we love Spotify Wrapped so much because it's an excellent lens with which to explain ourselves to the world, each other, the web. Whether our approach is snooty ("
I've been into Billie Eilish since way before the rest of you plebs") self-deprecating ("
Look at how bad my favorite music is"), or earnest (As my dear friend and
My Chemical Romance superfan Stephany put it in her Instagram Stories, "I bleed My Chem lyrics") we're curating a tiny window into our taste, one of the defining facets of ourselves as we interact and perform on a digital platform. It's hard to convey our true desires, values, and inner lives on social media. It's easy to convey what we like and dislike, to imbue either with an ironic spin. Spotify Wrapped gives us a performance-perfect opportunity to articulate and identify. And we eat it up, reliably! I sure do.
So,
First name / dear reader , how did you feel about your Spotify Wrapped (or the concept in general) this year? Hit reply to let me know — pinky promise I'll write back AND validate your taste. You are seen!
