It fascinates me to watch the rise of the…commodification? of one’s Spotify account. I feel like when I was in college, there was a lot around crafting aesthetic public playlists and making sure you only listened to “cool” music because others could see what you were listening to in real time. But now, we’ve gone even further, allowing Spotify to tell us who and what we are and encouraging us to share (or hide!) what it says about us.
Maybe I’m just old and grouchy, but what I used to like about Spotify Wrapped has faded and now it’s been replaced by something more convoluted, vague, and maybe even a bit sinister. I just want to know my top songs, genres, artists, minutes, and maybe a few silly facts or something. It used to be so unlaboured! But now? It’s an ordeal.
Everyone has to be careful about what they’re listening to throughout the year so that they can capture that elusive perfect Wrap, which isn’t at all the way we actually interact with music; we listen to the same song or album about a hundred times in a week, and then move on. Or, at least, try to—Spotify insists we be drawn back, shouting our mixed feelings from the rooftops. Spotify tells us we have special ~personalities~ by wrapping up a nonsensical string of adjectives, like “pink pilates princess pop” one month and “upbeat psychedelic early metal punk rock” another. But do these actually mean anything? I’m inclined to think not, other than vague outlines of time series genre preferences.
Perhaps the worst transgression of Spotify Wrapped is the fact that now you have to watch every single darn “story” to get to the results. You can’t fast-forward to the end, either. No, you have to watch vague colourful squiggles and dots move around your screen in order to see what your top genre was, or in which percentile you’ve scored as a monthly listener for John Williams. They used to just give the lists and graphics to you and you’d run to post them on Instagram or Facebook. But it’s so much more work, now, and not something for which I have any patience left during the fraught month of December.
I don’t care about what silly persona Spotify has assigned to you or how many new artists you listened to. Music is supposed to be personal—but, as with most things these days, technology has made some aspects better while making others worse. I don’t want to be chasing minutes so that I don’t feel self-conscious about my pittance of only 5,000 minutes this year. I don’t want to listen to music I don’t enjoy in order to engineer the ideal Spotify profile for the end of the year. I don’t want to be barraged with everyone’s Instagram stories as they all essentially post the same thing.
Spotify, if you’re reading this, please stop overcomplicating something that people like me want to actually enjoy! Gold star for creating a new social media commodity so successfully, but now I want my brown paper-with-string Wrapped that I can pull apart in a few seconds, not this gaudy impossible twisty sparkly 2024 Wrapped monstrosity.
