With this year’s Spotify Wrapped expected to drop in the coming days, users around the world are preparing to view and share their listening stats. In anticipation of the annual event, now is a better time than ever to evaluate the positive and negative effects of Spotify Wrapped on music culture.
For those unaware, the audio streaming provider Spotify introduced Spotify Wrapped in 2016. Each year, in late November or early December, Spotify offers users statistics on the total amount of time they spent listening to audio on the app as well as the artists, songs and genres they listened to the most. Spotify presents this information in an easily shareable format, thus allowing users to post their results on various social media apps. The event serves as an extremely effective marketing campaign, with posts by users essentially acting as free advertisements for the streaming service. In response, other streaming platforms (such as Apple Music) have introduced their own annual personal listening data events. These similar features have not reached the same level of influence, though, because of Spotify’s greater number of users. Thus, most posts about listening data on social media appear to originate from Spotify users.
These posts can have a number of positive benefits for music listeners. For example, social media users may see someone’s Spotify Wrapped and bond with them over shared music taste. Additionally, people may check out new or unfamiliar artists if such artists are posted by friends or family members. Essentially, Spotify Wrapped can connect people with other like-minded music fans and introduce people to new music.
However, Spotify Wrapped has become increasingly redundant as resources like Stats for Spotify and Receiptify have become available. These websites offer individuals to view statistics regarding their Spotify listening history for different periods of time such as the past month, six months or year. Some have even taken to posting their Receiptify results at the end of each month, sharing their top artists much more frequently than before.
These websites also offer music listeners a method to manipulate the results of their Spotify Wrapped with greater accuracy. If a Spotify user was extremely concerned about what artists would land in their top five, they could simply log on to a Spotify statistics website and adjust their listening habits accordingly. Surprisingly, this does not seem to be an uncommon occurrence. On social media apps, many users have posted about how they will leave a certain artist playing on Spotify overnight or when they’re not listening to music to alter the results of their Spotify Wrapped. In this way, Spotify Wrapped may not actually be an effective tool in sharing listening habits, but rather another part of an image a person carefully curated for themselves on social media.
Sure, people who care that much about their perceived listening history are probably part of the minority. Still, the phenomenon reflects unhealthy societal desires to want to meet certain standards or appearances. In the age of Spotify Wrapped, ‘posers’ are effectively given an easy way to place themselves inside a community of true fans of different artists.
In order to restrict the accuracy with which users can manipulate their statistics, Spotify should prevent users from viewing their listening statistics on other websites throughout the year. Of course, it’s unlikely Spotify will agree to this. They have no real reason to limit those websites at this point, especially because posts of Receipitfy statistics offer Spotify another free source of advertising on social media. The honesty of listeners does not affect the company’s bottom line in any respect. In fact, manipulation by listeners can increase the total amount of time a person spends streaming content, thereby increasing Spotify’s advertisement revenue.
Regardless of the future of Spotify Wrapped, we should strive to limit the value we place upon how “desirable” our listening habits are. We live in an era of unprecedented access to music, and we should take advantage of that fact every day by listening to whatever makes us feel best — even if that music embarrasses us.
Matthew Rentezelas is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].