Scrolling through social media or messages in early December is a sure way to see millions of people’s Spotify Wrapped. On their profiles, people post their listening minutes, who they listen to and their specific music taste. Spotify Wrapped is an end-of-year recap for every listener that shows the music they listened to and how much they listened to music. Its colorful slides and smooth animations have made Wrapped uber-popular.
Kai Holschuh, a junior, explained what makes everyone’s Spotify Wrapped important to share.
“Your wrapped feels super personal because it’s a representation of you,” Holschuh explained.
The music people listen to can be a core part of who they are. Listening to certain types of music or certain artists can show certain parts of their character. For example, younger people may be more likely to listen to trendier music, who more commonly listen to pop music or hip-hop, while immigrants may potentially listen to music from their homeland or childhood.
Spotify Wrapped has become a widespread, global social phenomenon, much more than a simple recap.
“It’s like a social phenomenon because people want to share their Wrapped with their friends and on social media,” Holschuh said.
Sharing a music recap at the end of the year has become common for a few reasons. Friends or peers may want to share their results to see similarities or differences. Spotify itself has promoted Wrapped to be a social phenomenon with several features. A new feature introduced this year, the Wrapped Party allows anyone to automatically compare their own taste with someone else’s, instantly.
While Spotify Wrapped has benefits as a social event and a representation of one’s character, it can often be distorted for the sake of conformity or potentially for the sake of being different and unique.
“Spotify Wrapped makes people want to listen to more popular or mainstream music to fit in with peers or friends,” Holschuh explained. “They might be worried that people might judge them or it won’t look good, so it definitely alters what music you might listen to.”
Many people may distort their own listening for the sake of conformity and “fitting in” with friends and peers if their music taste is different from what is popular or favored at the time. People may also feel that their Wrapped does not accurately represent their own expression. It may seem, in this aspect, a simple recap may be unable to reveal the scope of someone’s music taste accurately.
While Spotify Wrapped contains inherent benefits of social expression and has become a classic event at the end of the year, it has also created pressure on people to conform with others’ music tastes. It is important to consider Wrapped as an entertaining, but also flawed mechanism where numbers, streams and true taste can be misguided in the name of fitting in.
