Spotify Wrapped is creepy, meaningless – and shows just how much data big tech has on you

The annual summary of your listening habits has become a phenomenon – but marketing wheeze aside, Wrapped doesn’t reflect what we truly love

As a marketing exercise, it’s hard not to be hugely impressed by Spotify Wrapped. In less than a decade, the streaming giant has somehow managed to turn what’s essentially a bit of automated data-scraping into a global event. It’s a triumphant exercise in underlining the platform’s dominance in its field – this year, it arrives with the slogan Wrapped Or It Didn’t Happen, as if music consumed via Spotify is the only music that matters – and indeed in getting free advertising by encouraging users to share on social media Spotify’s personalised and heavily branded lists of most-streamed artists and listening trends. This year, the arrival of Spotify Wrapped results was heralded by a huge billboard advertising campaign, brand partnerships ranging from Amazon to FC Barcelona, a London launch gig that stars Sam Smith, Charli XCX and Chase and Status and the launch of the “Spotify Island experience” on wildly popular online game platform Roblox. It has provoked features everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times, from Variety to this very newspaper. The latter’s report was enlivened by quotes from a Spotify employee, who compared Wrapped both to “election night” and the arrival of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

Said employee was presumably speaking from their desk in Spotify’s legendary Department of Laying It on a Bit Thick, but empirical evidence suggests that Wrapped has become a surprisingly big deal. This week, my teenage daughters eagerly checked their results against each others’ and those of their friends. The results are more elaborately presented than ever: they now come with a “character archetype” based on the way you use the streaming platform – fans of “light upbeat music” are Luminaries, those reliant on algorithms to pick the next track are Roboticists and so on – and an add-on that tells you where in the world you’re most likely to find people with similar music tastes to you. But my kids appeared less interested in the way their ostensibly “favourite” artists were ranked than in the amount of time they’d spent listening and the number of songs they had listened to. In a world where streaming is the main means by which music is consumed these figures appear to act as a badge of honour, “proof” of how into music you are, a 2020s equivalent of walking around school with an album you were either borrowing or lending tucked under your arm to signify the seriousness of your commitment to prog or punk or metal or soul.