As I review my annual Spotify listening review, I’d like to add a few caveats right away. Yes, Debussy is my second most listened to artist, followed closely by Brahms, but my taste in music is otherwise very youthful and contemporary, especially when I’m not writing. And why Doe Maar is so prominent among my favorites? Because the baby is so nice on his knees Belle Helene. The Thong Song from Sisqo? I can’t explain well. Let’s stop tenacious youth sentiment.
And this seems like a fairly average number of listening minutes, but I have a record player at home. Lots of complicated records too, too bad Spotify ignores that part of my musical identity. I use a different app for podcasts, to come back to that average number of listening minutes. Had also tapped otherwise. Spotify Wrapped may think it has me figured out, I mean, but I’m inscrutable, an enigma.
What Spotify does understand is how marketing works. This is the fourth year in which the streaming service has told us in colorful, one-click-shareable animations which songs and artists we listened to the most, how often we played them, what new genres we discovered and how fanatical we were compared to others. listeners. This is also the fourth year of sharing that information with our followers en masse. You can cautiously call it a December tradition: free advertising for a company that squeezes artists and has a dubious door policy, just because it wraps our own data like gifts.
Because of the shiny paper and that big bow you can almost overlook the fact that listening to music has a strange element of competition added. ‘You have played more music than X percent of the other listeners in the Netherlands’, Spotify congratulates its subscribers, for example. Or, “You were in the top 1 percent of all artist X listeners this year.” And in a prefabricated tweet, all you have to do is hit share: “This year I listened for X minutes. Do you think you listened longer? Find out with #SpotifyWrapped.” Something as moving, aphrodisiac, mood-enhancing or intense as music can be flattened into statistics about the consumption of a product. The value is in the minutes, numbers and percentages.
And the competition element is seized with both hands. By K-pop fans, for example, who use Spotify Wrapped to accuse other fans of substandard listening behavior. It’s their joint job to stream their idols from BTS to the top, so don’t come up with a few cowardly listening sessions. “Please don’t judge me, I know I can do better,” said a girl who has played the number “only” 203 times this year. Life Goes On played.
Lil Kleine’s fans have done their best, according to a video that the rapper shared on Instagram. According to the annual overview he received from Spotify, his music was streamed 191.9 million times by 7.9 million people. ‘It gives me great pleasure to see that so much is still being listened to,’ says Lil Kleine, showing his canal house and expensive car in the background. With the word ‘still’ he refers to the leak of another video in which he pulls his ex-girlfriend’s hair out of that expensive car.
Have we still been able to learn something from Spotify Wrapped: that next year we should use the word ‘cancel culture’ less often.