Spotify Wrapped sucks
A scientific analysis of why everyone you know is wrong
It’s here. Oh lord, it’s here; unmissable, intense, and awful — yes, it’s Spotify Wrapped.
Watch in horror as your friends and connections post a list of top artists that include Drake, Taylor Swift, Fleetwood Mac, Phoebe Bridgers, and Frank Ocean, and caption it, “LOL!! My taste is so wacky!?!”
Am I bitter? Yeah, of course. I mean, have you read this newsletter? I’m a gnarled little troll boy at heart, and Spotify Wrapped magnifies this side of me.
And maybe, just maybe, I’m a little jealous of it too.
I use Spotify for background music. My days are spent writing and listening to playlists like “Piano chill,” “Relaxing music to work to,” “Relaxing piano chill vibes,” and “Chill vibes you can work or relax to, it’s your call, really, maybe there’s some piano in there too, who knows?”
Thus, each year, my Spotify Wrapped is a collection of artists I’ve never fucking heard of. It sucks.
But the idea behind Spotify Wrapped? Now that’s something I can get on board with. Visualised data? Embalm me with it.
This led me down a rabbit hole of why this is the case — what is it that makes statistics-driven things like Spotify Wrapped and exercise logs so addictive?
At first, I thought it might be linked to the psychological impulse of collecting. Some of the key reasons for accumluating items include exercising control, outward expressions of a hobby, or to sate anxiety.
And, you know, it being fun as all hell.
While that explanation makes sense for collecting, it doesn’t quite gel with why we love statistics models like Spotify Wrapped.
The more I thought about it, the more I came back to this quote: “art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.”
If you follow this path, listening data, then, is how we understand how we decorate time.
It chains the ethereal. It quantifies something that, beforehand, was unquantifiable.
And this holds up across many forms of data, from food and exercise, to what movies we’ve watched and beers we’ve drunk.
But, if this is the case, and we’re trying to get the best picture of how we decorate time, why are we using Spotify Wrapped?
It’s imprecise, the data hidden behind flashy animations; it only tracks from Jan 1st to October 31st; and is only available once a year.
Instead? We should be using the blessed Last.fm.
Personally, I couldn’t imagine things any other way, because I still own my music.
The majority of my listening is done via my digital library, something I’ve been building for nigh on two decades now. Last.fm tracks this and my Spotify habits, giving me a much more holistic view of my listening habits.
It also gives me so much more insight than something like Spotify Wrapped.
I can see what I’m listening to day-by-day, week-by-week — and that’s just on the default platform itself; there are a gamut of other tools (my favourite being Last.fm Stats) that allow me microscopic insight into my music data.
It’s everything that Spotify Wrapped wants to be. Last.fm truly lets me understand how I’m decorating my time.
Let’s not get it twisted: there’s nothing really wrong with the yearly social-bait of Spotify Wrapped. It’s fun, it looks pretty, and, if it makes you happy, who the hell am I to tell you otherwise? Your Dad? As much as I wish, I think not.
Despite saying all that, I’m sorry to inform you that Spotify Wrapped still sucks.
Long live Last.fm.
Period.