Spotify Wrapped is our messy soundtrack for a chaotic year
The streaming giant's annual stats tell us a little about the music industry, and a lot about 2020's psychological toll.
VANCOUVER – “I kinda wish I could see what my listening was like in the last 6 months,” I wrote the group chat. “I feel like it’d be better.”
Last week, my friends and I marked the most solemn of millennial holiday traditions: comparing, and at times commiserating, over Spotify Wrapped. The retrospective feature, which debuted as an email in 2015, and now operates as an in-app story, gives users a data-based snapshot of their audio activity, using brightly coloured graphics to reveal their top songs, artists and genres of the year. Typically, the experience carries the same cache as a high-school yearbook – plenty of nostalgic sparkle, with a couple LOLsy curveballs. In 2020, though, it feels more like a black box, like the record of a crash captured in real time.
While most year-end roundups tend to reflect qualitative critical consensus, Spotify prefers to focus on quantitative data. Play counts are the engine driving Wrapped, but some users question whether the numbers are even accurate. “My ‘top song’ was a song I played five times total, so Spotify tells me” said Hazel Cills, Jezebel’s Senior Pop Culture Reporter. The group chat, too, said they felt their roundups randomly overemphasized certain parts of their library. “According to Spotify I listened to Rain On Me 50 times in one day lmao” wrote Alex as the five of us compared notes, “like was my Spotify playing on repeat?” “I literally think i accidentally left a Beatles playlist on or something lmao” echoed Kate.
As my pals wondered whether the streaming giant had juked their stats, the apparent accuracy of my Spotify Wrapped had me reeling over my frayed relationship with music in 2020. Of my top songs of the year, three are pre-release singles from the 1975, each of which debuted before COVID-19 arrived in North America. Another is from their album, Notes on a Conditional Form, which dropped in May. The only non-1975 song to make the list is from Waxahatchee, whose album dropped in March – just as B.C. went into lockdown. Across 22,370 minutes worth of music, my favourite tunes can be traced almost directly back to pre-pandemic times.
Post-lockdown, my love of music fell into a crevasse that threatened to swallow my fandom whole. With people ordered to stay home and stay apart, the record industry retreated to the fringes. Tours were re-scheduled, albums were shelved (at least temporarily), and venues across North America were forced to shutter. Seemingly overnight, my longest pop-culture relationship ghosted me in a desperate act of self-preservation. All that remained were digital offerings, which felt at best out of step, or at worst irrelevant.
Like so many others, I turned to podcasts to try and fill the void, keeping pace with How Long Gone’s aggressive production schedule just to feel something. For four-hours every week I listened to hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart talk about everything but the COVID-19 pandemic. The show’s frivolity helped pass the time, but I still felt that familiar itch. For a large part of my life, music has been a mainline to meaning. I wanted to be excited about songs and song-writers, but more often than not, the thought of exploring music felt exhausting. Even the albums that were obviously good (Phoebe, Fiona) failed to hold my attention.
Publicly I blamed the pandemic, but privately I wondered – had I lost my edge?
In October, I got my answer. One of my most frequented music forums, Chorus.fm, decided to create its own “Definitive Album List”. Inspired by Rolling Stone’s recent 500 Greatest Albums update, the endeavour invited members to rank their 50 favourite releases of all time, with the goal of forging an unofficial ‘master’ list for the website. With nothing on the horizon, I decided to partake, and to scour other people’s posts for recommendations.
What followed was a crash course in some of the most meaningful, and obvious, works ever recorded. In case my 1975 addiction didn’t tip you off – I tend to find things I like and fixate on them, meaning I have a deep knowledge of a handful of bands, and shallow knowledge about everything else. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Elliot Smith’s Either/Or, fell into that latter category until this fall. They were the soundtrack I had spent seven months looking for.
Through no fault of their own, new records reminded me of the pandemic. It lingered in the back of my mind as I tried to listen, and was an unavoidable point of reference in the press. Worse still, the lack of concerts left me with an overwhelming sense that I would never get to see the songs live. Dylan, Mitchell and Smith, however, existed on a different plain. The records were in the pantheon. The songs had been played live. The stories they contained were timeless.
But while those records felt like a rope ladder out of the crevasse, Spotify’s approach to music fails to account for this sort of Q3 breakthrough. The streaming service only considers spins from January 1 to October 31 in its Wrapped analysis, meaning the albums I will likely associate with 2020 for the rest of my life, the albums that cooled my simmering COVID-depression, barely registered. Desperate to get a snapshot of what my list would look like if it only included the past 6-months, I decided to roll the dice on Stats for Spotify. Their charts are plain Jane compared to Spotify’s Gen-Z fare, but the analysis rings true. You can see it here:
And don’t worry, of my top five songs of the year, two are still from the 1975.