Spotify Wrapped is telling customers their “listening age” this yr, primarily based on what period of music they listened to greater than their friends.
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Spotify
There’s how outdated you might be, and there is how outdated Spotify thinks you might be.
That divide turned clear this week with the discharge of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform’s personalised year-end recap.
It walks listeners by means of their high artists, albums, genres and extra in a self-reflective (and infrequently mortifying) interactive slideshow, primarily based on knowledge and delivered with sass. The decade-old custom varies barely in its aesthetics and substance yearly, and this version appears to have caught a variety of customers off guard by bluntly informing them of their “listening age.”
“Age is only a quantity, so do not take this personally,” reads one of many slides, earlier than continuing to alternately humble, amuse and confuse.
Charli xcx, the 30-something electro-pop artist who invented “Brat,” is spiritually 75, Spotify declared, as a result of she listens to music from the late Sixties. The genre-defying, synth-savvy Grimes has a listening age of 92, whereas introspective singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams clocks in at 14, about half her actual age. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, when requested by a reporter, revealed his comparatively youthful 44.
It is not simply celebrities. Inside hours of Wrapped dropping, social media was ablaze with screenshots and memes from listeners principally both bragging or baffled about their listening age — notably these many a long time youthful or older than their precise age. Jokes about “listening age hole relationship[s],” dinosaurs and psychiatric evaluations ensued.
It has grow to be the norm for individuals to repost their top-five lists and listening-time tallies on social media — each giving Spotify free publicity and presenting a piece of themselves to their community. That was very true in 2023, when Spotify assigned listeners to “Sound Cities,” relegating them to locations like Burlington, Vt., and Jakarta, Indonesia.
“[Spotify Wrapped] is a means by which we’re capable of undertaking our id primarily based upon our cultural consumption,” says Marcus Collins, a professor on the College of Michigan’s Ross Faculty of Enterprise (and an R&B fan with a listening age of 40, a number of years youthful than his actual age).
Listening age, for higher or worse, is one other means to try this.
“It creates one other id undertaking drive, one other … shock to the system for us to speak about,” says Collins, who beforehand labored on iTunes initiatives at Apple and ran digital technique for Beyoncé. “In the event you’re 20 and your listening age is 70, what does that say about you?”
OK, so how did Spotify calculate this?Â
Spotify didn’t reply to NPR’s request for remark by the point of publication. However on a webpage explaining its course of, the corporate says listening age relies on the concept of a “memory bump,” which it describes because the tendency for individuals to really feel most linked to music from their youth.
Analysis exhibits that adults’ brains particularly maintain onto recollections from their teenage years, each usually and in terms of music. One 2013 research, for instance, discovered that younger adults had sturdy constructive recollections of the music that their dad and mom — and even grandparents — liked after they have been that age.
“There’s this concept that there are life levels … the place we’re receptive and open to new music, the place music kind of shapes the experiences that we’ve got, and as we get previous these years, we form of keep … in that second in time,” Collins says.
Spotify says it combs by means of a listener’s songs to determine the “five-year span of music that you simply engaged with greater than different listeners your age.” It hypothesizes that this five-year window matches a listener’s “memory bump,” assuming they have been between 16 and 21 when these songs got here out.
“For instance, for those who hearken to far more music from the late Seventies than others your age, we playfully hypothesize that your ‘listening’ age is 63 as we speak, the age of somebody who would have been of their childhood within the late Seventies,” it explains.
Collins says this strategy not solely performs into our sense of nostalgia but in addition helps “carve out the place we sit within the timeline of our … social world.” Our listening age tells us extra about ourselves and provides us one thing new to speak about with our buddies, particularly if it is excessive or sudden.
“We do not discuss issues which might be simply boring — we discuss concerning the issues which might be unbelievable,” Collins says. “It will get our consideration but in addition sparks this a part of us that makes us need to interact.”
What is the catch?Â
Is not this only a ploy by Spotify to get individuals listening and reposting? Is it turning our shock into free publicity? Are we being — the 2025 Oxford Phrase of the 12 months — rage baited?
These are truthful inquiries to ask, Collins says.
“What one might even see as a productive means by which individuals can interact with individuals, one may see it as a manipulative means of getting individuals to have interaction in consumption,” he says. “The reality of the matter is, it is each of them on the identical time.”
Collins says it is a win-win scenario as a result of “the very best advertising on the planet is us.” Spotify is attempting to get enterprise for its platform, he says, but in addition serving to individuals join — which in flip helps it much more.
Collins says that he, like most individuals, learns that Spotify Wrapped is dwell from buddies posting theirs on social media, relatively than TV or on-line commercials. That in flip makes him need to see and share his stats, “not as a result of I really like Spotify a lot, however as a result of I need to take part within the social practices of my individuals.”
“One of the best promoting is not promoting — it is cultural manufacturing,” he provides.
For its half, Spotify says that every of its slides is “made to be correct, truthful, and reflective, whereas nonetheless protecting a way of thriller and magic.”
It is that thriller that a few of us might discover barely maddening. Personally? As a fan of ’70s music, I used to be fairly content material with my listening age of 70 — till my a lot youthful, cooler sister instructed me hers: 73.
