Wrapped on Spotify: An ingenious stroking of our ego

It’s official: we are two beats away from the end of the year. And for the past few years, New Year’s resolutions have been accompanied by a review of everything we’ve been doing in the past 365 days. Our digitized lives help/impose/generate a whole narrative; another matter entirely is whether it is worth being read, looked at, or listened to.

For years, the media and the big content creators have delivered their lists, some more controversial than others. But do we really need to review our entire existence as if it were the top 40? And do we need to share the color of our musical aura (yes, that exists) with that work colleague we haven’t seen for 13 years but who opens each and every one of our Instagram stories? Who needs it?

You will already have Spotify Wrapped at your fingertips. It arrived on December 4 with no prior warning: there were bets on when it would come out and X accounts reporting on it to the last minute. As has been the case since 2016, the music platform delivers a personalized gift, packaging the music you have listened to endlessly all year on worn-out headphones. This could be interpreted as a nod to personal curiosity, as if we don’t know which bands and singers we’ve plugged into most, but the review goes into such detail that we find it fascinating, forgetting that the detail comes from Spotify gathering up — and using — all our data on location, taste etc. In fact, we love it so much, we go on to share it ad nauseum on our social media.

We don’t even stop to think whether our friends will care if we listened to a million minutes of Taylor Swift this year while feeling increasingly jaded as others bombard us with their listening habits. This is egoism taken to the extreme.

Our own glorification as connoisseurs — as people who not only hit the play button, but who are curators of our own taste — is part of the fun. But it is also funny to see oneself from the other side: to laugh a little at how egotistical we have all become. The message to those who listen to our music is that they are great, but that we are greater; and to those who listen to other music that they are original, but that of course we are much cooler. And all this goes on for days online. It is a strange digital race of praise and laughter, with a “but me more” in the background.

Meanwhile, we are actually paying Spotify to launch the ultimate advert. This is why other platforms such as Tidal and Apple Music are joining in. Always brilliant when it comes to their products, Apple have come out with Apple Music Replay with Top Listeners List and “streaks,” a feature that reveals the longest number of consecutive days a user has played from Apple Music. Streaks also extend to artists — as in, if a user had an artist as their No. 1 for multiple months in a row. And yes, Taylor Swift triumphed, as she has triumphed on Spotify. Nothing new here, nothing original there, but how cool is it when Tay arrives and greets you in a video to thank you as if you were her neighbor? Our egos continue to inflate.

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