Spotify Wrapped: What Happened?
By Beth O’Halloran, Music Editor
On Wednesday, 4 December at 12pm sharp, Spotify Wrapped was released after weeks of teasers, general excitement, and envy from watching Apple Music’s yearly roundup. A disturbance in the force was felt. I watched as the majority of students studying abandoned their books to file out into the library corridor, eagerly letting their friends know that it was finally here. Despite crashing multiple times, I finally managed to get a hold of mine, but it wasn’t long before the excitement quickly fizzled out into confusion. Where were my top genres? How did last year’s listening manage to seep into this year’s round up, despite being forgotten about? And what on earth is a Pink Pilates Princess? Despite Spotify Wrapped existing for years, improving and implementing new features with each successive increment, what led to this year falling so flat?
I was to discuss in this issue the excitement that Spotify Wrapped brings year on year, asking strangers about their top song, with the more embarrassing it is the better. But given the fallout from this year’s release, I couldn’t help but ponder the reasons why. While last year was certainly impressive, giving a location that matched your listening when compared to other users, as well as charting your music evolution throughout the year, it’s no surprise that this year would be tough to beat. But this year felt lazy and uninspired, relying on pop culture buzzwords to try and create an air of relatability, while at the same time being wildly inaccurate. Watching my parents look at theirs in real-time made me silently pray that I wouldn’t have to explain to them what the difference between dark and light academia is, two familiar terms to the chronically online that fall flat on the ears of the unknowing. It’s difficult to have to explain terms that only really make sense in an online, pop culture-motivated environment. When taken out of this context, it exists in a vacuum, and doesn't do itself many favours.
While my friends and I each have varying music tastes, something we can all compare and contrast is each other’s Wrapped. But when each one of us allegedly listened to Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop over the summer, we instantly knew something was amiss. It suggests a clear lack of inspiration when organising genres, and feels like they opted instead to try their hardest to cram everyone into limited boxes, regardless of how many minutes of Sabrina Carpenter you listened to this year. In my case, my top artist was Taylor Swift. I’m a big fan, of course, having flown to London to see her live, but my own instincts and knowledge of my listening doesn’t make any sense of this. Anywhere else in my top five artists? Sure, but number one? I listen to a lot of music, but not nearly enough of Swift to account for this position, and I’m not alone. Inaccuracies littered throughout the round-up has left many listeners feeling confused, with artists and songs that they haven’t listened to in years cropping up in their year-end lists. If you went through a Lewis Capaldi phase in 2019 and haven’t listened to him since you’ve left school, then it truly makes no sense for it to resurrect itself five years later.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this year’s Wrapped was the AI podcast, where two disembodied hosts discuss your listening journey. While it offered some of the clarity that wasn’t present in the main presentation by breaking down your monthly listening by artist, the AI hasn’t entirely nailed its human mannerisms. A phrase uttered in a different, unnatural way takes away the sincerity, replacing it with the chill that usually comes with the feeling of the uncanny valley that you just can’t shake. This heavy reliance on artificial intelligence may also allude to its usage in statistics, replacing the job of data analysts. This coincides with large layoffs of Spotify staff throughout 2023, with a total of 1500 workers being laid off in December 2023, losing 17% of its workforce. Last year’s listening somehow managing to wrangle its way into this year points to an algorithm that is slowly eating itself. Waiting over a year for a look back on my year of listening just to have a rehash of last year’s events seems as if they’ve caved under pressure, scrambling to find something that people have reflected on previously and will have to again. The announcement that any listening would be counted after the 31st of October hinted at a possibility of a wider scope of analysis, or to some, relief that there was still time to salvage their year of listening. However, given the result, was there really any point? The more time taken to formulate the final presentation should ideally result in the longer, detailed one that we look forward to year on year. It’s clear that this simply wasn’t the case.
The word to best describe this year’s Wrapped would be disconnected. Perhaps the reason why Spotify Wrapped has become the cultural phenomenon that it is known as is the connection it brings us to music, our favourite musicians, and most of all, each other. It’s a conversation starter, a topic for small talk, a bonding point that may lead to the start of a new friendship. Wrapped also gives us a moment of reflection on the year we had, and can offer a moment of nostalgia while simultaneously letting us look forward and move on. It’s unfortunate to see that this year’s moment of reflection was instead marred with bewilderment, as if one has looked at themselves in the mirror and not recognised what was there. Regardless of how hard Spotify tries to manufacture their plastic bubble of relatability, it might not even be a person on the other side.
