As I write this, we're nearing the end of October. The beautiful season of Fall is slipping away. Supermarkets are already stocked with Christmas decorations. Before we know it, it'll be December, and we all know what that means: Spotify Wrapped 2025 is almost upon us.
The annual wrap-up celebrating your music taste and favorite artists is an important time of the year for many people. In fact, I know many acquaintances who refuse to cancel their Spotify subscription solely due to Wrapped's existence. Spotify has nailed its marketing tactics, if you ask me, because there are better music streaming services out there, especially for hi-res, lossless listening.
While many people I follow on Instagram await Spotify Wrapped's arrival, I can't help but dread it. Spotify Wrapped, in my opinion, started out as a lovely celebration of your year-in-review, with quirky graphics and stats you hadn't actually thought deeply about prior to its drop. So what's changed? Why, it's become a popularity contest, of course! Or maybe it always was one all along. Either way, let me take you through my personal take on Spotify Wrapped...
Every minute counts
For those of you who don't use Spotify or are unaware of what Spotify Wrapped entails, here's a quick rundown. It typically includes your top five artists, music genres, and top songs. That's not all. It also calculates whether you're in an artist's top 0.005% of listeners (or 0.1%, 5% or 10% even), and it calculates the total minutes you've spent listening to music.
And this is my biggest issue with Spotify Wrapped. The total listening minutes, and how much some people value an arbitrary number. I've seen people bragging about how they've listened to music for more than 100,000 minutes. In fact, the last time I shared my Spotify Wrapped on my Instagram was back in 2021, and I'd listened to perhaps 30,000 minutes. Someone replied to my story and told me they "liked music more" because they'd listened to over 300,000 minutes.
And that annoyed me. Look, I wasn't born yesterday, and I'm very well aware that all social media platforms feed and reward vanity, and the number of likes (or minutes, in this case) determines just how cool and unique you are. The need to be liked and perceived in a particular way by everyone else is slowly but surely killing the things that actually make us unique individuals.
This is why we can't have nice things
Aside from who-listens-to-music-every-waking-minute-of-the-day, Spotify Wrapped is a competition to see who has the most eclectic or the best taste in music, which is, of course, subjective. What sounds good to me might sound awful to you, so why must we compete against one another to determine whose taste is more superior?
I've had friends panic about listening to certain artists on Spotify because even though they love the artist's music, they don't want Spotify to record them as one of the artist's top listeners. A former friend of mine was worried that he wouldn't be able to share his top artists on social media because it would "be too embarrassing" and because "that's not really who people think [he is]."
My question is, how does it matter? I, for one, know that my top artist this year will probably be Lorien Testard because I've spent way too much time listening to the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 soundtrack. That kind of music isn't for everyone, but I wear it as a badge of honor because I adore that game and its OST.
We should really be celebrating the different artists and bands that have added substance to our year, rather than worrying about what others will think of it. Surely the saying "a lion doesn't concern himself with the opinion of sheep" isn't lost on our generation.
No one's to blame
It's not Spotify's fault, of course: all it's doing is presenting you with facts and statistics. People aren't to blame either. It's nobody's fault. All it comes down to is just how prevalent social media is in every area of our lives, and the fact that it has a suffocating grip on many of us to the extent that we can't enjoy ourselves without letting others know where we are, what we're doing, what we're eating.
Social media, in essence, harnesses the power of FOMO — the fear of missing out — and so does Spotify. Things that are supposed to make us happy are weaponized in a way. Music is a source of comfort for many of us, but through the power of social media and algorithm round-ups, like Spotify Wrapped, it has been turned into something that we use against ourselves.
Didn't get minutes in the tens or hundreds of thousands? Listen more next year. You weren't in the top 0.000001% of listeners of your favorite artist? Listen to nothing but them next year. Your top artists don't look as edgy or indie as someone else's? Try again, there's always next year!
Feelings of inadequacy run deep, and many of my friends and colleagues I've spoken to echo my opinion in one way or another. This isn't to say I won't be looking at my Spotify Wrapped when it drops — of course I will — but I really wish we hadn't reached that point in our evolution where everything is a popularity contest.
I think we'd all be better off if, instead of feeling embarrassed to be listening to an artist you actually loved, we celebrated our own unique tastes.
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