Each year on the last day of November, Spotify offers its users a compilation of personalized listening statistics compiled over the year known as “Spotify Wrapped.” Music fans are eager to recap how many minutes they have spent listening, who their top artists were and which songs they played the most. For the first week of December, social media platforms are annually overrun with people posting their Spotify Wrapped. In 2022, Time reported that nearly 160 million people engaged with spotify wrapped, half of which shared a post about wrapped on their instagram stories. That same year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify Wrapped had over 400 million mentions on the social media platform X within 3 days of it being released. Like any major internet event, the return of Wrapped never fails to stir up controversy, typically surrounding whether or not it should be shared.
The dissenters hold that they are uninterested in how other people enjoy music, and are upset due to how the Spotify Wrapped takeover dilutes more engaging content on their social media feeds. Many social media apps use algorithms to curate content for each user based on their activity on a given application, but a tidal wave of posts on one topic often bypasses this filtration, frustrating users who are accustomed to content that they personally find highly engaging and attention-grabbing. Other voices highlight Spotify Wrapped and similar phenomena as distractions from more pressing and severe current events that are drowned out on social media.
Despite this, many people enjoy sharing their Spotify Wrapped, seeing how other people’s music tastes align with their own, and characterizing themselves with the artists they support. For example, this year, Spotify added an element to Wrapped that told users what part of the world listened most like them, helping users connect to a virtual music community similar to their tastes. Locations like Burlington VT, Cambridge MA and Berkeley CA were particularly popular.
Spotify Wrapped clearly means more to some users than to others, and it is understandable that for the less enthused among us, having wrapped plaster one’s feed for days could become tiresome. However, the very fact that so many people share their Spotify Wrapped speaks to an overall interest from social media, and general appreciation for the community-building opportunities provided by sharing one’s Spotify Wrapped.
For those who would do away with Spotify’s Wrapped, I suggest taking a brief hiatus from viewing stories or possibly even social media as a whole if the experience is truly upsetting. Ultimately, it is but a brief period once a year, and it is always phased out by another hot topic in a matter of days. There is little good done by defiantly expressing disdain and judgment against others and the harmless interest music lovers share through Spotify Wrapped.
