Please shut up about your Spotify Wrapped

Our music listening habits are a little bit like our dreams: reflecting on them is passingly interesting to ourselves, and to no-one else on the planet. Thankfully, it is fairly widely understood that sharing your dreams is a conversational no-go. 

At the worst, people tell their partners about particularly vivid dreams, who through the social obligations created by love politely make a few noises to indicate they are listening before moving the conversation on to anything else.

And yet, every year, people voluntarily opt themselves into a mass marketing campaign on behalf of the tech giant Spotify, a service everyone uses despite knowing on some level it has been largely terrible for the music industry, paying artists a fraction of a fraction of a penny per listen.

This coordination is what makes Spotify sharing so much more unbearable than the more niche – but equally irritating – habit people have of making threads of every book they read, or every movie they watch. The inevitable lack of engagement that such threads receive never quite seems to tell people that it would be better in a private diary than on a public website. But at least these threads never suddenly become half a social media feed.

The lack of variety in the posts about Spotify Wrapped are telling as to what utterly dreary content it is. There are three varieties: “same as last year, got to try more music next year haha”, “managed to mix it up a bit more this year” and “don’t judge me, my kids use my Spotify more than I do haha”.

None of these are remotely interesting to any other human being. On some level, Spotify’s marketing team is clearly aware of that, as every year they add a new gimmick to Wrapped to serve as engagement bait. These are evidently well and carefully tested, because by the time they’re rolled out and inflicted on the rest of us they’re always effective.

This year’s gambit was to “guess” your age – purposely badly – from your listening habits, something which once again proves irresistible to most of us. A good guess would be completely boring, but a bad guess is almost irresistible, and inspires us to a self-mocking post defending our musical taste – “how DARE you say I’m 50 just because I’ve got great taste in the classics?”

It is extremely clever algorithm farming, because these posts do often encourage more activity. This is a trick personality quizzes or political alignment games learned long ago: we don’t particularly find other people’s results interesting, but seeing them posted makes us curious as to what our own would be. That click counts as engagement, though, and juices these kinds of posts in our feed. They become inescapable.

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People have an inalienable right to be both boring and basic on social media, but there is an additional level of frustration with Spotify Wrapped. People who the rest of the year post anxiously or angrily about the effect of algorithmic manipulation or big tech suddenly and merrily share these posts – one of the most blatant, if largely harmless, examples of just that. 

It is a digital version of the old analogy: when you’re in a car and complaining about being stuck in traffic, you tend to complain about the phenomenon as if it’s something inflicted on you by the world, or at least by everyone else. The reality is much simpler, though: you’re not in the traffic, you are the traffic. 

Spotify Wrapped is a benign irritant, but it’s a reminder that the reason social media is full of garbage is more complicated than we might like. Blaming the “algorithm” for everything is easy, and because companies pay people to test and juice it in their interests, not entirely wrong. 

But the reality is that it serves up the content it does because that’s what we look at, and that’s what worked. As Emerson, Lake, and Palmer so nearly sang, the algorithm we get, we deserve. Spotify Wrapped is a seasonal reminder of our shared narcissism, of our persistent belief in the face of all the evidence that other people find our inner lives fascinating – even though we know we have no interest in that same information from others.

None of this is to belittle music or culture itself. It is merely to separate the abomination that is Spotify Wrapped from actual cultural conversation. Talking about a favourite band, a beloved track, or an amazing gig with a friend is a moment of connection, a collaborative project. 

Unless the two of you are great critics, it’s a conversation that would likely bore listeners, but that’s fine – you build it together, and you sought out the conversation. Similarly, communities like Goodreads might look like the same kind of pointless listing of reading habits, but they are opt-in. People seek them out, and they’re framed around actually discussing the book, not just spooling off a list of what you’ve read.

So, if you’re one of the few righteous people who’s on social media and didn’t post a Spotify Wrapped, congratulations – you should be widely celebrated. And if you’re one of the many, many fallen who has been narcissistic enough to think people were longing to see what you listened to this year, be comforted by this: at least you weren’t egotistical enough to write a whole newspaper column on the subject, eh?