If the total number of minutes is lower than mine, I scoff and deride them as unserious listeners in my head. I wonder if the minutes listened stat includes podcasts - of which I have heard zero in my life, and very much plan to keep it that way - or is it just the songs. Or maybe they left their Spotify open for a few weeks while they went on vacation. If it’s considerably higher than my Score, I assume it’s a family account that’s the only explanation. I look at the number of hours they’ve spent on Spotify this year. I see other people sharing their stats on social media.
Spotify unwrapped code#
Everyone knows this it’s not some super secret indecipherable code that only the gifted social scientists among us can crack. That they’re tracking my listening habits.
An elaborate ad for Spotify that people happily indulge in. (Before the bores chime in, I should clarify that YES! I am 100% aware this is a marketing campaign. Yet I get sucked into the trap because of all the shiny toys. The stuff this year I’ve truly spent time with, learnt from, grown with, suffered with - that’s the reason I or anyone listens to music in the first place. Spotify Wrapped should not be telling me what music I like I should be telling it what I want to hear. It doesn’t make any difference at all how much time I spent listening to music or what kind or why. I’d know it’s no more than a collection of completely bullshit statistics. If I spent even a minute thinking about it, the whole thing falls apart.
Spotify unwrapped movie#
It calls me the main character of the movie that was 2021. Even if I’d spent all year listening to whale sounds, it tells me, that would be valid too. And that even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter. It’s an achievement of some kind, right? Five hundred! And then Spotify tells me I did a good job.
So when my Spotify Wrapped, presented in jazzy story cards with an exciting colour palette, tells me I heard, like, 500 artists this year, it feels exciting. Honestly though, those are the best kind of ego boosts to exist. A house of cards built on frivolities and platitudes. A circular argument behind a façade of statistical certainty. That’s all it is: an entirely unnecessary, feeble, witless, vacant massage of the ego. Art builds communities it just as easily places people into neat little boxes.Īnd that’s essentially the impulse Spotify Wrapped taps into. It provides a sparse canvas on to which we can project a lot of that unspoken stuff that’s always cooking within us. There’s a certain abstraction in the way that music affects us, which is unlike other, more clearly defined art. But that’s always easier said than done put me in a room with one of those old-school metalheads and things will no doubt descend into juvenile farce about “real music” or something. How there exists a point beyond which judgement of aesthetics and assessment of morality and virtue don’t necessarily intersect. Today, I understand, intellectually if not quite emotionally, to sidestep these traps. Over on Twitter, for instance, people are still debating whether the Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones or not. It may be less now as we slowly wither away into old age, sure, but I won’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
Here was a personality I was able to rent when I had none of my own. And I attached a significance to it that perhaps didn’t exist, allowing it to shape me. Like when I was younger, the kind of music I’d listen to was, in my imbecile worldview, objectively better than what people around me were into. This aspect remains secondary, and best enjoyed in good humour without attaching any great virtue to it, but it lingers. Much as listening to music is a personal journey toward meaning and catharsis, an escape, a reconciliation with the whimsicalities of the world, there’s always a, like, competitive spirit to it too. With that commonsense caveat out of the way, I’ll admit the Spotify Wrapped thing they do as each year draws to a close is still loads of fun, if only in a deeply sinister sort of way. And not in that generic, ambient sense that all big tech companies are monsters and late capitalism will eat us all up one day or whatever. Spotify is evil - even the people working there know this by now.
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