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Happy Spotify Wrapped!
It’s our favorite corporate holiday, that special time of the year when every Spotify user receives a package of highly stylized factoids and blurbs revealing what they’ve been listening to.
I have to admit: it’s well done. Wrapped is probably one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the century. Almost no other brand could galvanize its customers to provide this amount of free advertising. I mean, in 2021 over 60 million people shared their Spotify Wrapped results with their friends and followers.
But for me, as a Spotify critic, Wrapped is a real opportunity. The overwhelmingly public nature of the Wrapped campaign makes it an especially fertile moment to interrogate the tech behemoth. And while I toil away at this here Substack all year long lobbing discursive stones at the Swedish Goliath, it’s on this fateful day that it seems like the entire world joins me in engaging with the odd nature of Spotify and the streaming economy. With the awkward fact that the app is tracking your every listen and repackaging that data as a gift. With the strange and creepy nature of Spotify’s Big Brother ad copy. Even if you anticipate Spotify Wrapped with glee, there surely is a moment during the Wrapped experience when some vague thought of “this is kind of weird, right?” crosses your mind.
And I feel like that’s especially true this year. Spotify has gone sort of kooky, creepy mask-off this Wrapped season, adding a few key features to their campaign which beckon some surprisingly deep questions about the nature of taste in the algorithmic age.
Audio Day
The viral boondoggle that Spotify Wrapped threw at us this year was their mood/time-of-day feature. This new feature tells us what kinds of moods we musically engage with at different points in the day.
The moods they offer are not merely chill, sad, happy, etc. but rather Gen Z copy pasta like “Cottagecore Pumpkin Spice Comforting,” which is what I apparently listen to in the morning or “Confident Energetic Euphoric,” which allegedly was my nighttime vibe. There were many, many more mood descriptors that others users got though, meme-able ones like “Clown-core” and “Goblin-core” and “tender” and “city-pop.”
According to Spotify, the purpose of this feature is to “give you a peek into how your music taste evolved throughout the day, showcas[ing] the niche moods and aesthetic descriptors of the music you listened to during morning, midday, and evening time periods.” And man, what is life but a series of “niche moods?”
I actually don’t know for sure if these “niche moods” are purely random, but my guess is that they do have some real correlation with the music we listen to. But to whatever extent these moods do relate to how our favorite music sounds, it’s only so these mood-descriptors can strike enough of a nerve as to compel each of us to share our results on social media. They want us to feel both confused and exposed. And they want to inspire us to ask our networks to help us decode the nature of our reported being. Their intended vibe is “haha WTF but also meeee low key . . .”
And why not? We all need content for our emergent brands. So thankfully Spotify has made each of us a personalized meme. And we are in turn able to give the digital Gods their required daily post.
Your Listening Personality
Measuring our momentary moods is fun, but this year, Spotify wants to go even deeper. The corporation has taken it upon themselves to make a new Myers-Brigss. And thank God! I needed a new pseudoscientific way of measuring my essence.
As Spotify says, “It’s not only about what you listened to—but what that says about your music taste. This year during Wrapped, we’re showcasing 16 different Listening Personality types that Spotify created for 2022 Wrapped. Your Wrapped will showcase your Listening Personality based on how you listened to music throughout the year.”
To calculate this, Spotify has 4 metrics.
You may have not realized until just now, but this whole time you’ve been reading the words of an . . . . ENVU! Sorry if you haaaate ENVU’s (also a gemini btw)! Anyways, being an ENVU means that the traits I hold are “Exploration, Newness, Variety and Uniqueness.”
All of this makes me “An Adventurer.” See below:
And like, for sure! I do love finding new music and my taste is very eclectic and changing all the time. But how can I look at my listening habits on Spotify as anything close to a pure metric? Spotify is not some austere platform where my favorite songs exist in one sleek, white interface untouched by algorithms or manipulative design. Far from it. Spotify is not an iPod, but Times Square, flashing recommendations and playlists and new releases and mood mixes at every digital turn.
The variety of music I listen to is surely impacted by this constant onslaught. And like yes, I have chosen to listen to Spotify’s recommendations and I do truly like to listen to a wide variety of music. And I suppose the existence of all of these traits’ opposites does show that some people do remain “familiar, loyal,” etc despite the recommendation-onslaught. But whatever wisdom is to be taken from this has nothing to do with musical taste. If anything, it has to do with our behavior on Spotify. I’m an ENVU in my usage . . . Deep.
And maybe that’s meaningful. Maybe that could be thought of as a stand-in for taste in the streaming age. We do, after all, listen to almost all of our music on the app, so maybe then our behavior on the platform is as valid a measure as any in discerning our taste.
Crunching Numbers
While Spotify’s new Wrapped feature may confound us, they still give us our raw listening data. And this is the crown jewel of the Wrapped Experience: a straight-up list of your most-listened to artists and songs. If any insight is to be gained, it’s from this feature.
But even these raw numbers are dubious.
I am committed to not sharing my Spotify wrapped (it’s basic!!!!!), but I will say that my second most streamed song is “American Girl,” a fun pop anthem by LA-based indie artist Kilo Kish. I like this song. It’s fun. And I did add it to some of my playlists. I even listened to it intently a few times. Now though, whenever an album ends, “American Girl” comes on due to Spotify’s autoplay system. (If you’re curious to learn more about that, I discussed this at length in another recent piece.)
Does this song then say anything about my taste? I mean I liked it, but it was streamed so many times because of Spotify’s code. What then do my raw streaming numbers mean if they are illustrative of my own behavior and that of Spotify’s queue algorithm?
And in addition to this fudging of the data, what if the songs I streamed the most don’t necessarily represent my own sense of taste? Taste must mean something beyond what we listen to the most, right? What if my most-listened-to song was representative of a specific period of sadness and anxiety? Or of a particular era of sociability? What if that time was a blip, and yet my cumulative data shows me a picture of myself I find unrecognizable?
Taste Making
In all of these features, Spotify is offering a few different definitions of what it means to have a taste. Be it our changing vibes throughout the day, or the behavior of our listening, or the hard data of our yearly rotation.
But we have to remind ourselves that none of the answers Spotify seeks to cheekily provide mean much. Ultimately, Spotify Wrapped should be thought of as no more than a social media content product that exploits our anxiously vague sense of self. In the frazzled business of digital life, none of us have the time or energy to truly know who we are or understand how we feel throughout the day. Spotify provides some data, some answers, and some content-food for our digital-fodder.
And we take the bait. We engage and share. And throughout the process, we sort of validate their ideas about what taste is. From their silly mood feature to even their raw streaming data reports, we don’t question the structures of surveillance and algorithmic manipulation that undergird it all. Instead we wait eagerly for Spotify to tell us who we are. And abide their wishes and share, share, share.
I can’t help but wonder if Spotify does not want us to be able to self-define our taste. Because when we wait for Spotify to spill the beans, and accept their analysis and data as anything deep and valid, we turn away from engaging with our own taste ourselves. And we let them define our taste for us.
More power to them, but I call that market capture. We can though, resist the monopoly.
What do I like and why? What do I like and why?
Say it a few times like a soothing mantra. Then try to answer it in the dark.
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envus checking in !
So good as always!