Spotify Wrapped – UNwrapped

Reaching the end of the year, we look back at the music that shaped us during the last twelve months. The most popular retrospective for music listeners, Spotify Wrapped, is a gift that comes early. It’s already been a month since Wrapped was released, and I've used that time to inspect this present with a closer eye. Crucially, I looked at how accurately Wrapped reflects listening habits with the data it collects. Then with the help of Pleaser staff, I dove into the larger question of how our music streaming footprints shape us as listeners.

Is Wrapped accurate?

Wrapped is intended to encompass your listening for the entire year, but the simple fact that it releases before the end of the year—this year it came out before December even began—illustrates that it, in fact, does not paint a full picture. Users calculated the scope of Wrapped data in a Reddit thread, finding that listening for 2023 was only logged from January 1st to November 15th. This renders streams on the remaining days of the year essentially invisible. In addition to losing total listening numbers in that period, albums and songs released late in the year are consistently unlikely to make it into the final data because they don’t have much time to rack up streams or miss the tracking window entirely.

The specifics of how songs qualify to be included in your stats are interesting as well. Spotify tracks both total listening time as well as play count but splits how that data ends up in your Wrapped. The five top songs and artists of each year are ranked by play count rather than total time listened. A play count is only triggered after 30 seconds of listening. This means that for longer songs, the play count of each song weighs much less than the total time listened. 

Image credit: Lauren Arzbaecher

Even with these more known aspects of how the data is collected, many users still claim on social media that their Wrapped doesn’t match up to their listening. Some in the Reddit thread even went so far as to compare the data with other trackers such as Last.fm. Spotify allows users to request the entirety of their listening data within the privacy settings page for those who want to pore through the raw numbers, which a few in the Reddit thread used for their findings. While the majority of the compared data was similar, some posters claimed there were some outliers on Spotify’s end, but not enough to swing the data into a completely different outcome.

Now, whether that sense of inaccuracy is due to slightly skewed data or the fact that one’s taste in music is subjective and evolves regularly, is more muddy. Wrapped may not be perfect, but it certainly plays the biggest role in bringing listening data into the mainstream.

Does data analytics impact how people listen to music?

The day that Wrapped releases, screenshots of people’s top songs and favorite artists flood Instagram feeds. Like revealing your favorite movie or TV show, sharing your listening data lets people see a part of you. And sometimes that part is embarrassing. Especially when people have their perceptions of what listening to a certain artist or style of music means. When polled, the majority of Pleaser staff said they enjoyed sharing their Wrapped, but it often depends on what’s on it. The ‘ole fear of being perceived extends to a lot of things, music included.

Beyond just leading people to share their results when it releases, Wrapped has influenced listeners in other small, but impactful ways. Anticipating the summary at the end of each year, users have become more aware of how what they listen to—and how they listen to it—factor into the data. 

If you enjoy listening to your favorite song on repeat, for example, that song will likely appear in your Wrapped. That fact may lurk in the back of your mind, potentially causing you to play the song on loop only four times, rather than five, so the data doesn’t reveal your listening habits as obsessive. It could make you intentionally listen to it more, ensuring that it appears in your yearly wrap-up to showcase your level of fandom for the artist. Or it could not impact your listening at all but reveal the patterns in your style of consuming music.

Wrapped rewards repetitive listening, but that doesn’t fit the shape of how everyone consumes music. Playlist aficionados, shufflers, those who like to have music on in the background. All don’t fit into the mold of the data insights Spotify is looking for. 2023 Wrapped even added a feature that accounted for this: “Me in 2023” with characters defined by a certain listening habit. These characters were defined by a variety of factors, including how listeners move between genres, whether they like to make playlists versus letting the algorithm offer up suggestions if they stick to one artist, always listen to albums in their entirety, and more. While this feature accounted for differing listening habits, it didn’t change the top rankings. 

Image credit: Spotify

What does listening data mean for fans?

Listening data is a mirror of how we interact with music, but it’s more of a funhouse mirror. It reflects a distorted picture. Sure, it looks like you, but the likeness is wobbly. Being a fan of an artist or music, in general, extends far beyond just what can be captured in the data of a singular streaming service. 

When polled, Pleaser staff felt strongly that an artist doesn’t need to be in your Wrapped top five artists ranking for you to consider yourself a super fan. They also agreed that repetitive listening to one artist doesn’t necessarily make you a bigger fan. Fans can hold up their Wrapped as some kind of proof about how much they listen to a particular artist, but you can treasure an artist’s music equally as much without a high number of streams. Going to concerts, telling friends to listen to an artist, following them on social media, or simply just listening to an artist’s music through different means all factor into one’s fandom.

Perhaps the most interesting element in how listening data influences fans is the differences in online representations of their music taste versus talking about their taste in person. On all social media, people craft a particular picture of themselves—whether consciously or unconsciously—to present online. With music, it’s often a means of appearing not like other girls with your tastes to garner a sense of uniqueness or social capital. But if you talk to someone face to face about who their favorite artist is and why they like them, you most likely will get an answer that’s very different from what their listening data portrays.

In our internal poll, one Pleaser staffer questioned if people are presenting an idealized version of their taste through Wrapped or if they are just not able to articulate their taste offline. Arguably, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

Wrapped provides a jumping-off point for people to codify their listening habits, but being a fan is more than just numbers. As it continues to evolve in coming years, the data Wrapped and other listening trackers provide is sure to subtly shape trends in listening, but will never fully define what it means to be a music fan.