Spotify Is Using You
The streaming behemoth has once again ensnared us in its icky web with their latest Wrapped campaign.
It’s that special time of year when music publications collectively pretend December doesn’t exist so their year-end lists can rack up more traffic before January. Which also means it’s time for Spotify’s annual Wrapped feature, which analyzes each user’s listening data and spits out a glorified PowerPoint presentation on it, along with shareable graphics. This year’s version touched down yesterday; if you don’t see it when you go to the Spotify app, that means you need to update to a new version, or maybe even update your entire iPhone, as I had to, just so Spotify could tell me what I already kinda knew about my own listening habits. Thanks for forcing me to finally update to iOS 18, I guess?
This year’s Wrapped is even more soul-crushing than before. Spotify worked with a Google A.I. tool to churn out individualized Wrapped podcasts in which two “hosts” recap and compliment your taste for a few minutes. If you enjoy robots congratulating you for spending thousands of hours on an app that is actively ruining musicians’ livelihoods, then give it a whirl. The joke about Spotify is that they’re more interested in pushing podcasts (and more recently audiobooks) than music—even in their signature year-end music feature, that now rings true.
The other new inclusion to 2024 Wrapped is called “Your Music Evolution” and gives a superficial glimpse of how your taste changed throughout the year. They anoint these micro-eras with goofy names like “Alien Permanent Wave Art Pop” (because I listened to a lot of Björk, Fiona Apple, and Charli that month) and “Indie Sleaze Catwalk Pop” (because I listened to a lot of Charli, Chappell Roan, and Beyoncé that month). Lest you feel the urge to judge me, as is the way of Spotify Wrapped: Much of my listening happens via my iTunes library, so this is just a slice of my consumption. (Spotify also got rid of the locational analytics that would tell me some random town in Vermont has the same, very gay taste as me, which was fun, if vaguely stalkerish.)
Wrapped this year is giving enshittification, despite the fact that Spotify is expected to have its first full year of profitability in 2024. Keep in mind, the company laid off a buttload of people late last year, and its co-founders have sold off shares worth hundreds of millions dollars. Typical corporate bullshit, but it’s still ambiently depressing to realize Spotify can get even worse.
I am always a bit puzzled when other music writers and indie music professionals share their Wrapped results on Instagram and Twitter. These are people who know better than most that Spotify’s payouts to artists are borderline inhumane (around $0.003 a stream), that they’ve demonetized 80 percent of the songs on the platform, and that Spotify generally devalues curation and discovery in favor of promoting bigger artists. (Sidenote: I’m really looking forward to Liz Pelly’s deeply reported book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, because it stands to highlight these issues even more than the good folks at United Musicians and Allied Workers already have.) Maybe I’m no better because I still pay this evil company money every month. But I draw the line at free marketing. That’s a strange sentence for me to type, because there was that one time, seven or eight years ago, when I was told by my former employer that I was going to appear in a Spotify Discover Weekly ad campaign, back when the streamer cared just a little more about emerging artists; I did, and it remains one of the biggest regrets of my career.
Why do so many people, when presented with a simple graphic representation of their music taste, choose to share it? To put friends on to their favorites, as my colleague Dylan Green told me, which is a valid reason but not so much a utility to the Brat-loving masses. I move with shame around not being able to quit Spotify, which is kind of the rub with it—having so much music instantly available has changed my own listening habits and life for the better, but at a massive cost to the vast majority of artists. If you care enough to care at all about this, then why help this company become more popular?
Before Spotify existed, and before I lived in a city with local record stores, and before anyone told me about mp3 blogs, I used to buy all my music at a Best Buy next to a Chuck E. Cheese’s. I still remember the layout of this Best Buy, and maybe even hold a fondness for it due to the amount of time I spent lingering at their CD listening stations. Now imagine if Best Buy sent out a little laminated card displaying all the CDs I bought in a given year. Imagine me going to high school in 2004 and showing off my super cool Best Buy card to all my friends, bragging about my favorite music. Not even I was that dorky! Wrapped is even worse, because at least artists were making a decent percentage from all those CD sales.
It’s not the platform that matters, it’s the act of recommending music and owning one’s taste. I believe most people who publicize their Spotify Wrapped feel this way, it’s just that the app automatically does the work of creating animations that are begging to be shared. Of crunching the numbers so that one doesn’t have to do the work of reflecting on their favorite songs and albums of the past 11 months. I wanna know everyone’s taste too—I just think it’s worth taking a few minutes to jot down an unranked list in the Notes app, or gather up album covers and write a thoughtful IG caption, or share pictures of the records you’ve bought and loved this year, or hell, even make your own playlist. It’s not gonna look super slick or make you feel like you’re participating in the cultural meme of the week, but I guarantee it will feel more meaningful to you, and anyone else who finds it.
