Every year since 2016, the end of November has been one of my favorite times of the year for one reason and one reason alone: Spotify Wrapped.
For those who don’t know, music streaming platform Spotify releases an annual year-in-review that’s personalized to each of their users. User data–including total minutes spent listening, most played songs and artists, top genres, and more–is collected throughout the year and presented in a colorful, tap-through story format.
Throughout the years, Wrapped has become an exciting opportunity for users to share their taste and love for music with others. The event is particularly popular on Instagram. On launch day, you often can’t go through more than two stories without someone sharing some aspect of their Wrapped. It’s interesting to see how obscure some people’s top artists are or how much of their year they’ve spent listening to music.
Though I always look forward to the design of each new Wrapped, I wasn’t a huge fan of this year’s color scheme: black, pink, orange, yellow, green, and purple. I thought the particular shades used were all a little too bright. However, that’s my only real critique, and still I can see the appeal in those color choices. They’re perfect for creating eye-catching playlist covers and are incorporated into some of the stories in a visually appealing way, such as in the new feature “My Audio Day.”
“My Audio Day” describes the types of music an individual listens to from “sunrise to sunset.” Some people may start their mornings off with “Cottagecore Escapism Kindness,” enjoy some “Pastel Goth Hallyu Joyous” in the afternoons, and end their day with “Confident Energy Hype.” The feature’s quite unhinged, but that’s what makes it so entertaining. I also loved the single story that simply read, “This year you had layers like an onion. But you listened to music, unlike an onion.” This top-tier quote introduced the other new feature of this year’s Wrapped: “My Listening Personality.” Similar to the Myers-Briggs personality quiz, this feature puts users into one of 16 distinct listening personalities based on their listening habits throughout the year.
As much as I love Wrapped, I do find it a little creepy. Online, our personal data is constantly being collected. What we watch, buy, search, and listen to are tracked and used by companies to show targeted ads, among other purposes. Every web user knows this happens, but what I find so creepy about Spotify Wrapped is how they’ve successfully made their data collection exciting for users. We all know they don’t collect this data purely for our entertainment, but we don’t really think about the implications of what it takes to make each Wrapped when all we care about is our top artists of the year.