I won’t be seduced by Spotify Wrapped – this app has anaesthetised me
December 4, 2024 4:03 pm(Updated 6:14 pm)
Here is what I learned from 2024’s Spotify Wrapped. My most-streamed artist was Taylor Swift (shocker). My most-streamed song was “360” by Charli XCX (shocker). I had a brat summer (shocker). I listened to a hell of a lot of Chappell Roan (shocker). I went through a “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop” phase (now that is a shocker).
And most damning of all – that Spotify has destroyed my taste in music.
For several years now I have spent £11.99 a month for some nerds in California whose annual bonuses are worth more than I’ll make in a decade to anaesthetise what was once a broad, interesting, rich, music taste to something so unimaginative and tedious that I spent a few weeks of this year thinking “Please, Please, Please” by Sabrina Carpenter was actually a good song (I’ve come to my senses).
I promise I’m not a dick about it. I won’t pretend I’ve got high-brow or superior taste – I’m a country-pop girl and always have been. But I was once someone who was stimulated by the discovery of new music rather than so paralysed by choice that I need my brain to be pacified with the same song, or one exactly like it, again and again and again.
Where did I used to find the bands I most loved? MySpace profile songs, mix CDs, Limewire (sorry), music channels, Radio 1, whizzing through my friends’ iPods. It wasn’t remotely sophisticated, but it was something about which I felt pride and ownership and it was active, not passive, sharing songs on MSN, putting lyrics in my screen name, hoping they’d say something about me.
All Spotify Wrapped tells me is how dramatically this app has cauterised my curiosity and how limited and joyless it allows music-listening to become. And of course some silly animated data that shows I listened to “Down Bad” by Taylor Swift so many times in one day I am prompted to post it on my Instagram story and make a joke about my critical mental state on 25 April.
Spotify was supposed to expand my horizons. It has had the opposite effect. I went to Glastonbury last year and was embarrassed by how few artists I’d “got round” to listening to. I once marvelled at this magical portal into the history of recorded music, now it sits alongside Slack and Instagram and WhatsApp on my phone and tells me what to play and I’m too tired to argue.
That’s not really because I love a song and am choosing to mainline it until I can no longer bear it (I once inexplicably listened to the song “Airplanes” by B.o.B ft Eminem and Hayley Williams 80 times in one weekend). It’s because Spotify’s misleading ease of access, and its position on my phone, has turned what should be a jukebox of mind-boggling choice into a tool of pure passive functionality.
I open the app and, as with every other app I use, can’t be bothered to do anything more than tap on the thing immediately in front of me – which on Spotify is the eight albums or playlists I listened to last, and which probably only ended up in that pole position because of Spotify’s autoplay when your chosen song finishes.
Spotify hasn’t made things easy, it’s made us lazy. It’s turned listening to music into a secondary activity rather than a pleasure and leads us to default to the last thing and whatever the algorithm suggests might be similar enough for us not to protest.
Those auto-chosen songs might bear similarities in BPM to other things I listened to but tend to be as “curated” as “You like one woman under 30 who sings about her feelings so you might like another”. They never challenge me, introduce me to something new or special, or even capture my attention – in fact they seem deliberately engineered to be played without my noticing it’s there (which might make me turn it off or close the app). Spotify doesn’t soundtrack my life – it turns music into background noise.
It has also made me scared to try out music I might not like. Even though – unlike with a physical album or single – I’ve already paid for the gamble! It’s now unfathomable to me that I might once have bought and listened to a record all the way through without already hearing it and knowing I loved it. I will never take a risk on the unknown. It even took me ages to listen to Chappell Roan and then she became another default choice that was easier than engaging with Spotify’s many playlist/podcast/audiobook/DJ options and overwhelming interface. It pacifies my racing mind with the familiar until the art loses all meaning.
The other problem is that – maybe because we haven’t had to commit to a transaction or a download – streaming stops us feeling an “ownership” over the music we listen to. We listen song to song, with alternative options one tap away, and eventually art becomes ephemeral and our relationship with it is closer to “quick distraction” than “deep emotional connection”.
Yes, there were three albums that dominated my year and which I expect will define it when I look back – The Tortured Poets Department, brat and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. But beyond that, based on Spotify Wrapped’s evidence, I spend hardly any time with most of the artists that really matter to me and a hell of a lot of it on a very narrow range of random songs by artists I don’t care about, fleeting obsessions and quick earworms I’ll never think of again.
Spotify Wrapped is a marketing masterstroke, and good fun if you like bright colours and being told something about your identity by a massive tech firm. But this year all it makes me feel is terror that the damage it’s done to my taste in music cannot be reversed.