Express yourself: Spotify...warped?

Editor’s note: More and more, listening to music is becoming an intensely private, almost isolating, experience. Everyone is sitting in their little pockets of the internet alone, with technology and the mobile shaping our habits. Akhil Sood argues Spotify Wrapped, the streamer’s annual year-in-review campaign, is more than an exercise in vanity. In sharing our “audio aura”, most played bands and more, we break our isolation. It becomes instead a rare ritual of sharing—in every sense of the word— in a splintered world.

Written by: Akhil Sood

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“If 2021 were a film,” my Spotify told me four years ago, “you were the main character.” Hell yes, I was; why wouldn’t I be? My “audio aura” suggested that my top moods were “introspective” and “melancholic”. Damn right. I got these insights while going through my ‘Spotify Wrapped’, the annual report card that the music streamer hands its listeners and creators once the end-of-year mood sets in. And, much like reading a horoscope and knowingly nodding as if it weren’t all gibberish, it felt and sounded great. I was being supplied, by an external agent, with all these self-affirming adjectives and descriptions about myself that I anyway believed to be true. 

Quickly, here's a rundown of what Spotify Wrapped is. It appears on your music streaming app by end November or early December; at the time of reading, you may already have your Wrapped waiting for you in your inbox. The format and presentation change a bit every year, but fundamentally, the concept remains consistent. The company sends you your year in review—it examines your listening habits through the year. It crunches the numbers. And then it offers a flattering analysis. In 10 or so slides, like an Instagram story, with music playing in the back. 

For one day each year, the internet becomes a joyous, collaborative, hypercompetitive space. Everyone shares slides of their stats on social media, picking and choosing the names and numbers they want to display to the world. Insights that conform to how they see themselves. They withhold the cringe and the embarrassing figures; they broadcast only the glossy highlights. And then the space opens up. People compete with each other, passive-aggressively with lots of smiley emojis, over who did a ‘better’ job. They fight. They talk passionately about their favourite bands. 

For this one day, in a splintered digital space where everyone has their own siloes, their own tastes and desires, we have a common culture. A spirit of competition, a spirit of community, and, of course, more than a dash of egotism. As with most social media activities, Wrapped too plays on the self-image of its users, providing them with a nice ego massage that the user can broadcast to their admiring (or not) friends, families, and fans. 

Of course, there are a lot of contrasting emotions at play here—both introspective and outward-facing—as with all things music. It is indeed performative like much of social media is. And that’s before we even get to the complicated position that Spotify occupies in culture. But at the same time, it’s an earnest, sincere attempt at self-expression. The individual and the collective together. Good and bad together. It’s about identity, about community, about image-building and self-mythologising. All together. 

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In addition to the cutesy nicknames and compliments, Spotify tells you who your top (five) artists were. What your favourite songs and albums happened to be. How many thousands of minutes you spent listening to music (or, ugh, podcasts). How big of a fan you are of your favourite band—I, for instance, was in the top 0.1% fans of Gustavo Santaollala last year. What genres you explored; which periods in the year you sought out music the most. Stuff like that. 

It inscribes all this data on to Instagrammable graphic cards with lots of shiny and sparkling colours. Each word, even when the numbers are alarmingly mediocre, is framed in encouraging, pep-talk-like language meant to make you feel good about yourself. ‘So what if you spent negative minutes on music? That’s OK too. It’s been a hard year; you’ll do better next time!’ The purpose, in case you haven’t already guessed, is engagement. Share, share, share, share!

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You see, Spotify Wrapped is (and has been for a decade) a manipulative marketing campaign designed primarily to go viral on social media. It’s an advertisement that you and I are airing for free. They’ve gameified the process. They appeal to your ego, your narcissism. Given the abstract, and often solitary, nature of recorded music—where you end up spending so much time in your head and superimposing all of these fantastical projections about the art and about yourself on to the experience of listening—it’s only natural for us all to let a hint of solipsism and vanity creep in. 

Music consumption has become a more intensely private, even isolated, experience. Today, while there’s infinite connectivity and access with the way technology has progressed, we end up spending a lot of time consuming art entirely on our own, in a physical sense. Everyone exists in little pockets and siloes on the internet—we all have our trusty YouTubers, Instagrammers, Twitch streamers, journalists, playlist options—which defines how we shape our listening habits. There isn’t a unifying space, a broad community, to exchange notes as easily. 

In addition, music consumption itself has been moving toward this for decades. The Walkman and Discman started this off. And the humble MP3 player in the age of lawless file-sharing in the early/mind 2000s carried the torch forward. Now though, it’s all on the phone—every single song in the world is a click away. And let’s be real; we’re all always on our phone. Music is no longer a dedicated activity that you make time and space for. It just happens.

And this convoluted smorgasbord of emotions is what Spotify capitalises on to gain traction. The desire to express parts of yourself through the music you listen to, and to seek community in others. The reason why it sticks out is because it’s such a strong contrast to the personal nature of music consumption in general. 

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This isn’t a particularly new or novel concept. All of social media, really, is regular people playing out a fantasy as they transmit a heavily curated and manufactured version of themselves to the world. 

More specific to the year-ender: Facebook used to have a popular “Year in Review” feature back when the platform still had some cultural juice. Now, of course, Facebook is a desolate post-war landscape inhabited only by our lovable elders drowning in ads, comical right wing propaganda, and AI nonsense. No one really cares about the recap anymore. 

Instagram allows users to customise their recap based on their usage through the year, in the form of a template they provide. Apple Music, a direct Spotify competitor, too has a year-end “Replay” that’s similar to Wrapped. Even Google Photos, for some reason, throws at you a rather puzzling year-ender on the app. Last year, for example, it told me my “2024 top colours” were green, blue, and orange. (What?)

So this idea of allowing users to look back—at a time when everyone’s in the mood for some navel-gazing—isn’t unique to Spotify. But they’re the company that seems to be doing it the best today. 

(Here, we must take a quick second to clutch some pearls about how Spotify is an amoral, evil enterprise that has built its empire on the blood of the very people it is meant to serve, the artists.) 

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At the same time, Spotify is also a lot of fun. In some weird way, Spotify Wrapped has become the space for a shared music culture that’s mostly absent today. Everyone watches the same HBO shows, the same superhero films. But people don’t really listen to the same music, together. They’re all on their own paths. The Wrapped, then, becomes one of the few occasions in a year when everyone—across the world, across different tastes—gets together on the internet and talks about one thing: music they like. 

The music nerds, the snobs, the freaks, the losers—they’ve always had their own spaces. Indie scenes in general are built on these principles of community-driven solidarity (and, indeed, competition). Those are subcultures united by shared interests. Spotify Wrapped, though, is able to cut across these borders in a uniquely global way that’s only possible in a wired, streaming world. It’s that open sense of community engagement going beyond party lines that’s placed in direct comparison to the increasingly isolated experience of music consumption. It’s this heightened sense of contrast that lends it a spirit of joy; for so many, on this one day the world feels connected in a human way. 

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Akhil Sood is the Editor of Advisory.