Spotify Wrapped is back! The yearly wrap-up has been a staple of the holiday season since its release in 2016 and can provide an exciting, marketable way of sharing your music taste (or, depending on its contents, not.) But Wrapped isn’t all the fun that it seems. Whether it’s in the negative effects of the online consumption of art or the data privacy issues it poses, Spotify Wrapped has multiple underlying concerns that we should consider.
Before Nov. 1, the last day before Spotify stops counting your listens, social media feeds are flooded with content reminding listeners that the clock is ticking for them to fix their Wrapped, as people scramble to correct a year of “embarrassing” songs or misguided artistic consumption. While this is a fun trend, it reflects the ways in which Spotify, and other platforms like it, encourage us to consume music not for ourselves but to present an idealistic version of ourselves. Spotify Wrapped and its offspring, such as the Apple Music alternative Replay, further our inclination to manipulate our consumption to show a “better” version of ourselves. Yearly rewinds reflect yet another way in which technology is restricting our authentic consumption of art. We use these data-driven representations of the music we consume to prove to ourselves, and those around us, that we did consume it. Spotify’s slogan for their 2023 campaign said it best: “Wrapped or it didn’t happen.” If a song didn’t leave enough of an impact to end up on your yearly Wrapped, did it even matter? A shareable Spotify Wrapped is just another label that many aspire to attain.
Additionally, there are numerous concerns with Spotify’s use of user data through Wrapped. No matter how aesthetically our music tastes may be presented, the fact remains that Spotify is harvesting hours and hours of our consumption habits for their gain. Wrapped relies entirely on user data to produce this each year. It’s ingenious — we enjoy the content of Wrapped, and they get to enhance their surveillance of us. Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group, Fight for the Future, noted this trend in an interview with Wired.“This is a particularly shining example of the fact that Spotify’s business model is based on surveillance,” Greer said. “Spotify has done an amazing job of marketing surveillance as fun and getting people to not only participate in their own surveillance, but celebrate it and share it and brag about it to the world.”
The data about the music we listen to is inherently personal. It shows our age, mental state, and how we wanted to feel and when. All the neon colors and silly commentary of Wrapped aim to appease the underlying facts: that Spotify is always listening to what you’re listening to.
So before you judge your Wrapped too harshly, it’s important to take a step back and reflect on why it is that you don’t feel proud of your listening habits (along with contemplating how Taylor Swift became your most listened-to artist for the third year in a row.) And it’s also essential to think about how and why it is that Spotify can take over the internet for a few days at a time, and how its use of our data furthers its own goals as a corporation and its dominion over the streaming industry. But all that aside, no matter what your Wrapped says, you made it through 2024 and listened to a lot of (at times questionable) music along the way. That’s enough to celebrate this holiday season.
