On December 6, 2018, I posted this to my Instagram story. I could write a book about the useless content I’ve shared online, but that’s not what I am aiming to do here.
According to the Spotify website, [Spotify] Wrapped is a deep dive into the artists, songs, and podcasts that defined your 2021.
2018 is the only year that I shared my Spotify Wrapped on social media. I tagged Maggie Rogers with hope she’d re-share it on her own profile. I know, it’s desperate. I’d just moved to a new city. I grasped for connection — with Maggie, with my friends who love her music, with anyone who used Spotify and celebrated this milestone each year.
But maybe I would have shared it in other years, if I wasn’t embarrassed by my choices. Was I embarrassed? I don’t remember.
Music has always been a point of connection for me and my friends. We burned CDs of albums and swapped them. We made custom mixes for specific car rides. We sat side by side and split the headphones of our iPods. We went to concerts, or watched them later on YouTube.
My friend Caroline describes Spotify Wrapped as a brilliant marketing ploy by Spotify to tap into humanity’s innate narcissism. Because nobody cares, nobody cares, but everyone shares it. I kind of agree with her. In my 2018 post, I wasn’t sharing music with my friends like I’ve always done. I was essentially bragging about myself—I listen to Maggie Rogers who is a Cool Artist, and I listen to her way more than you do. Caroline touches on people (like me) who brag about how many minutes of music they listened to in a year. Did you really listen to all that music or did you just have it on in the Google home in the kitchen while you were cleaning for four hours?
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In the car on the way back from the airport, Kate remarked excitedly that Spotify Wrapped would drop while she was visiting us. [I now realize this was a baseless claim, one born of wishful thinking rather than actual fact]. I’ve asked her at least fifty times today: what does Spotify Wrapped mean to you?
I want to recover when I felt excited about something seemingly straight forward: a list of my most played 100 songs from the past year. Nothing is a shock. This is not a horoscope, this is an algorithm. Does it provide status? Connection? Nostalgia?
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I flick back through my years of top songs. Each roots me in a place.
2016: Sarabeth’s Stuy Town apartment
2017: Me + Evie’s 84th Street apartment
2018: 84th Street, but also driving in a rental Kia with Michelle in Iceland
2019: Running through Shadyside, then Highland Park
2020: Our porch
I remember Andrew’s top songs of 2019 — we’d opened our results together to find that his was almost entirely the tracks of Morning Classical, the playlist we played for nap time for our sweet lil puppy.
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In the meantime, I think this is way more entertaining than the obvious aggregate of my rotation of music: Judge My Spotify. Feel free to share your results, if you’re looking for connection. Or don’t, if you’re fearful of judgment.