Music is amazing.
We listen to music for a multitude of reasons: to motivate ourselves, to take a moment and breathe; to ponder about life’s biggest mysteries, or to make time pass by fast. Minutes, hours, days are spent listening to the tunes we like, and those preferences change over time. As they continuously differ, we grow attracted to different genres and find favorites in them.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see what those were? Well, we’ve got Spotify Wrapped for that.
In the final weeks of every year, Spotify compiles the data it collected on our musical profiles for 12 months, and compresses all of it into a single story which tells the plot of that one year sonically, a story which disappears the moment midnight of the new year hits. That story tells everything; your music taste, your top artists, how many minutes you spent vibing, and even a “listener age” based upon the era of your selections.
The problem? It really is not that accurate.
As I checked the Wrapped for 2025, I noticed a very common remark among my friend group, and students in general.
“Bro what the heck? I didn’t even listen to half of these guys.”
It’s true; everyone complained about this year’s inaccurate statistics. Some had top artists they barely knew about, songs they never listened to, and listener ages miles away from what would be reasonably based on their music choices.
Well, the issue isn’t just limited to South Forsyth; it’s worldwide. And it can be explained.
Some Stats To Know
When Spotify records listeners’ data, it does so within a few boundaries. One of these is a date-based cut off. If you take 12 months of listening and remove a few, the remaining months act as the primary window to recover song statistics from users. For Spotify, the cutoff is usually late October, so much of the late-year listens will be absent from the final record.
Another thing Spotify does is that it rates replays based upon song length. The app needs you to listen to at least 30 seconds of a song in order for it to count, skewing shorter songs to have greater gravity in the overall calculation. This way, a short two-minute track played six times would be more valuable than listening to a 12-minute tune once.
Also, remember that one time you binged that one artist’s record 20 times in a row? That counts too. Small, yet intense repeat sessions skew your numbers by a considerable amount, for even that one singular time accounts for a portion of the data; that’s why that one guy you listened to once in April appears on your “Top Artists” list.
But this all is for a purpose, and that’s cash.
Here Come$ The Money
The entire purpose why Spotify Wrapped was created was to be a marketing product–something that would make someone deciding between streaming services choose the Spotify over the other apps.
It’s not, and never was, meant to be a hardcore statistical report.
All Wrapped does is takes 8,760 hours worth of listening, and compresses it into an 8-minute narrative for you to reflect on your personal tastes. It’s supposed to be the stuff you compare with friends, post on your Insta story, and reminisce about as the year comes to an end. These are the exact outcomes which marketing teams aim for, and that’s precisely what Wrapped does.
At day’s end, it’s a methodical strategy to win the company its extra bucks.
A Final Two Cents
Music, is still amazing. And I know it feels pretty idiotic that a platform we spend so much time indulging in music and connecting about it can’t keep proper track of what we listen to, ‘cause it represents who we are.
Music is a non-verbal language that tells people who you are indirectly, for it’s a portrait of the person that listens to it. With that much gravity, it feels like a necessary requirement for your taste to be represented correctly to others, and although Wrapped might not do it the best, be happy that it even exists in the first place.
‘Cause without it, how could we tell others how amazing we think music is?
Sources:
https://www.stylusonline.org/culture/2025/02/08/spotify-wrapped-2024-where-did-it-go-wrong/
https://www.newsweek.com/when-does-spotify-wrapped-2025-come-out-11063720
