Why Spotify Wrapped turns your music habits into a social event

Arts & Culture

Why Spotify Wrapped turns your music habits into a social event

Millions of Spotify subscribers woke up Wednesday morning to a much-anticipated annual tradition: Spotify Wrapped.

In 2016, the world’s largest music streaming platform began showing users their most listened-to artists and songs, assigning music fans different listening personalities based on their favorite genres. The compilation of individual user data comes in brightly colored, stylish infographics designed to share on your social media feed. With a name like “Wrapped,” arriving right on time for the holidays, it feels like a thoughtful gift from the streamer delivered directly to your phone.

Sareena Chadha is a doctoral student in �鶹�ƽ�� psychology department, studying relationships. (Contributed photo)

Even if you don’t use Spotify, there’s a good chance when you check your social media feeds, you’ll be flooded with information about your ex-boyfriend’s or college roommate’s year in music. It helps users feel more connected to each other.

“I’d define myself as someone who does not post on my (Instagram) story regularly, but I always post my Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay,” said Sareena Chada, a psychology doctoral student who studies relationships at the University of Virginia. “It lets you signal both your belonging to a group and your uniqueness.”

The streaming service even assigns users to groups. This year, depending on the common themes in the music you listened to, you might have been placed in the “full charge crew” or the “cloud state society,” then assigned a different role within that club, like the recruiter, collector or leader.

Chadha said the basic premise of most social media platforms plays on how humans evolved to relate to one another. Instagram, X and other platforms enable “self-disclosure” and “responsiveness.” In other words, you share your top song of the year, and your friend’s little brother swipes up to say he also loves MJ Lenderman.

“It’s a really easy launchpad for conversation,” Chadha said.

You might not comment on someone’s picture of their dog or their cup of coffee, but music provides enough common ground to warrant a conversation.

“It creates a sense of normalcy around sharing something that’s honestly pretty intimate, which is what you’re listening to. It reveals a lot about your mood and what kind of year you had,” she said.

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Broadcasting your music taste is a much older trend than Spotify, however. Jack Hamilton, an associate professor of media studies at UVA, pointed to the distinctive clothing jazz music fans wore during the early 20th century as an example. In the digital era, music blogs devoted to different genres proliferated.

“There were very influential hip hop blogs, or rock fan blogs, or pop fan blogs, but these were pretty niche,” Hamilton said. “You had message boards, too, but these were even more niche than the blogosphere.”

In the ’90s and early 2000s, the barrier to entering many music fandoms was higher than it is today. Hamilton said that often meant people engaged more deeply with what they listened to, because they had spent time learning about musicians and music history.

“Even just posting on Facebook your top 20 albums of the year required you to keep up with new music and have really informed, considered opinions on what you were listening to,” Hamilton said.

Sharing your Spotify Wrapped is “an event,” Chadha said.

Most social media algorithms show users content from accounts they don’t follow, “but the day Spotify Wrapped drops is the one day where you’re most likely to see things from people you actually know,” Chadha said. “Nothing beats an in-person conversation, but digital communication like that can satisfy some social needs.”

Jack Hamilton is a pop culture expert at UVA. (University Communications photo)

Spotify works like a “personalized radio station,” Hamilton said, generating playlists based on what users habitually listen to. Someone might listen to a track dozens of times without knowing any other music by that artist.

Spotify’s algorithm for producing these personalized playlists is kept in a black box, so it’s difficult to tell whether it reflects users’ tastes back to them or creates their taste. Regardless, Spotify and other streamers undoubtedly influence what people listen to and how often.

Still, Hamilton and Chada agreed, the music you like is a central part of your identity, revealing things like your relationships or even where you’re from. People have broadcast their music taste for a long time, wearing Nirvana T-shirts to identify themselves as grunge fans or Taylor Swift friendship bracelets to brag about scoring tickets to the Eras Tour.

“People listen to music for different reasons. Maybe someone listened to a certain instrumental a lot, not because they love it so much, but because it’s good background noise while you work or study,” Chadha said.

That’s a comfort to anyone who might have felt their Wrapped results were a little too revealing.

“I would never assume the music someone listened to the most was necessarily their favorite. We don’t do that for any other form of media,” Hamilton said.

Take a listen to this year.