Straight to the point

My favourite part of Spotify Wrapped day is psychoanalysing my peers. Oh, your top artist was Alice in Chains, was it? When was the last time you spoke to your father? Lana Del Rey is pretty high on your list, isn’t she — did you ever finish Lolita in the end or was it all a bit too wordy? Chappell Roan, ey… ghosted again?

Every year since 2016, one day in late November or early December, Spotify releases its personalised data hoards. You receive about 10 slides of digested stats on your top artists, top songs, hours listened and “vibe” — for example, I had a “theatrical vocal baroque” January, apparently. As a matter of course, you then share them on Instagram. The wild frenzy that greets it is like the flourishing of the mayfly; for at least 24 hours, social media becomes a gallery of humblebrags, with literally everyone you know posting screenshots of their yearly listening stats. I, too, have shared humiliatingly smug stories of my own Wrapped report card: top-five artists, top-five songs, secret delight at results which, I tell myself, set me apart from the Swifties lurking in my friendship group.

Having poked us with the algorithmic cattle-prod to sponsored genres and artists for the past 12 months, Spotify is pulling back the curtain to reveal that yes, we are in fact individuals with laudably individual tastes. Look, you’re in the top 1% of listeners to Lewis Capaldi! That must make you, somehow, exceptional, despite the certainty that his warblings were first piped into your AirPods while you shuffled through a rack of polyester loungewear at a provincial H&M. There is something sanctifying about the certainty of a data digest — its ability to both herd and coronate you. And Spotify knows this.

The compulsion to share exactly how we are special, via this musical ritual of Spotify Wrapped, is strange. For what could be more intimate than the song you chose to listen to again and again while staring out the window of the 344 after an abortive summer situationship? Yet we are still compelled to expose even these tender intimacies — for at least it suggests we have some depth. A meaning-laden song appearing in your ranking is like a scar from a tender blade, and our posting of it is a signal to others: admire my hinterland, I am complex.

Such is the power of Wrapped that users now admit to gaming their digest before it’s released; “imagine hating me, a girl who is simply in her room trying to change the trajectory of her Spotify Wrapped until it’s too late” read one viral tweet last week. Are some people genuinely listening to Kate Bush on repeat to knock Sabrina Carpenter out of their top five? My Zeppelin-devotee dad would hide his Madonnas at the back of his record collection; for us not so. Even our guilty pleasures, the secret indulgences of our inner lives, must be laid out for scrutiny.

The rewards of this relentless self-fashioning are significant: we narcissists love to feel special. And Big Tech loves reassuring us that we are exactly that. Throughout the year, Spotify will send you personalised “mixes” to cajole you with the assistance of an AI-generated, upbeat African-American DJ. That Gen Zs are attracted to the idea of an individualised radio show, whose host talks only to you and only plays music you already know you like, speaks to our desire to be deemed exceptional, and our aversion to being challenged.

It’s all a long way from the cultural tribes of old. A few short decades ago, school playgrounds were populated by oil-and-water groups of loudly dressed teenagers — here, the punks; there, the mods; hippies, skinheads, rockers, squares. The records you bought, the cut of your trousers: these were once shorthand for the subculture which defined your adolescence. By the time I was at secondary school, such tribes had all but disappeared; for whatever reason — certainly involving the atomisation of tastes brought on by the internet — the best you could hope for in the mid-2010s was one goth per village, a shuffling, black-clad relic still admirably committed to looking constantly miserable. Our consumption of music, like many other elements of youth culture, had morphed from the collective to the painfully individual. Why risk gassing about a new indie song in the canteen when it probably hasn’t yet made its way into the algorithm of anyone there?

Though 2024 has been in some ways defined by one of the biggest fan monocultures of all time — the obsession with Taylor Swift — the general music scene involves headphoned commuters listening to playlists comprising every different genre imaginable; a little bit of Elvis, a little bit of Charli XCX, leaving us with the impression that we are no longer part of cultural clans but selective, discerning and irreplicably special individuals. How Swift managed to gather up three generations — tweens, twenty-somethings and Millennials — with her lab-grown brand of pop must have something to do with its universality (being, you might say, universally bland); other artists who hope to succeed her (Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter) try to do so by replicating her ultra-processed musicality. Song-streaming apps, which encourage us to skip as soon as things get boring, have pushed out material which is difficult. The most marketable asset in modern pop is hyperpalatability, and the Wrapped charts will reflect that. So just as countercultures vanish, like the sartorially segregated playgrounds above, the insipid comes to blanket all.

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As a result, Spotify, Apple Music, even — gulp — Amazon Music, preclude a culture in which we hear snippets of a remarkable song by an unknown and unremarkable band in a little record shop. Instead, we’re fed “smart shuffles” which, though apparently random and niche, have behind them the heft of record companies who have paid to put that song in your ears, or at the very least place it on your TikTok “for you” page.

But I’m afraid to say that, at 26, I am not as invested in the hopes and dreams of up-and-coming bands as I once was. My adolescent Luddism about music — refusing to download anything, only burning full albums from CDs — now seems unbearably tedious, and I am addicted to Spotify’s convenience. Oh, Big Tech is buggering your debut single? Shame — yeah a medium latte, thanks.

I am just as blasé about data surveillance — a battle my generation lost the moment we got Facebook. Rather than being suspicious of Big Tech, we delight in the way it defines us — and curate it for maximum shareability. Instead of baulking at the bald fact that Spotify logs every millisecond of our listening, notes when we click and skip, and kettles its 626 million users into demographics — prosecco-swigging mums, try-hard roadmen, anxious bisexuals — we broadcast it for free, becoming pro bono brand ambassadors.

The allure of digital reports like Spotify Wrapped now dominates every corner of our digital lives. As I’m writing this, my tyrannical FitBit bleeps at me to get moving; I’ve just checked my nightly sleep report (score, 43 — poor), logged my weight and admired the step count from an ill-advised early morning walk home over the weekend. The point of it all is to explain things — why I’m knackered, why my calves are or are not shapely enough, why I am more virtuous tramping to work on foot than those suckers on the bus. The way such tech has become irrevocably integrated into our routines might explain the love affair between Gen Z and our data overlords — after all, what’s new? I suspect we will not grasp the sinister consequences of this narcissistic stat-harvesting until a massive leak exposes to the world the fact that we have a playlist dedicated to the Vengaboys; until then, just tell me how original I am again. Nobody understands me better than a million zeroes and ones stored in a cloud.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/