THE JOURNAL
Illustrations by Mr Pete Gamlen
There are algorithms that know you better than you know yourself. They usually operate in the background, harvesting data, only noticed when you get declined for a credit card or inexplicably nudged towards the latest series of Ray Donovan or the exact model of nostril hair trimmer that your dad once mentioned pops up in your Amazon recommendations. But occasionally, one surfaces with information about you that you’d happily share with the world. Spotify’s Wrapped list is just that, a slick marketing gimmick that turns your listening habits into a badge of honour. Launched in 2016, its annual arrival is marked by an avalanche of social media updates, like a million Wordle scores all posted at once (much to the annoyance of users of other streaming platforms). But what does the music you’ve played this year really say about you as a person? We’ve listened and this is what we’ve learnt.
01.
The taste faker
Think the new year starts on 1 January? Pah, amateur. First, there’s the pre-season research: end-of-year polls, DJs’ crunchiest white labels and poring over Pitchfork. Then there’s the hardcore bands building up buzz. That’s the A&R groundwork done, now comes the hard graft. Imagine Rob Gordon’s rigid mixtape rules from High Fidelity, but on a macro scale, projected over the 10 months till 31 October, the period during which users’ activity is recorded for Spotify Wrapped. It means hammering key new releases early on, then dropping legacy tracks. But none of the obvious stuff – more Prince side projects, Pavement B-sides (just not this one), Mr Pharoah Sanders cameos. How many aliases does Aphex Twin have again? So that, when his results are in, this guy can offer a demure, “What, this old thing?” He’s gamed the system to engineer his impeccable stats. (Then, come November, “the off-season”, it’s wall-to-wall Ms Taylor Swift just like everyone else.) But is he really the one that’s been played?
02.
The slave to the algorithm
Your first thought is to congratulate this dude on the sheer breadth of his aural palate. Everything from ODB to New Order, via NEU! But then there’s all the artists that you’ve never even heard of, and that he can’t even remember listening to, the sort of thing that makes Black Moth Super Rainbow seem a bit mainstream. Ghost Donut? Hyperspeed Battlegoat? Tank Sinatra? Surely, someone at Spotify has a random name generator and access to the “verified artist” blue ticks. This is what happens when all decision making is removed and you exclusively listen to Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist for a decade. Is he human or is he dancer? Japanese shoegaze and reggae covers of Talking Heads are no substitute for a soul.
03.
We don’t talk about… oh, you know
Like geological records from the very end of the Cretaceous period, his annual Spotify Wrapped playlists show a mass-extinction event shortly after Mr Kendrick Lamar dropped Damn. Where previously an “explicit content” tag was par for the course, if not a mark of distinction, suddenly the likes of Pusha T get pushed out. No more Run The Jewels, SZA, Cardi B. You can’t even play a Beyoncé album these days. In their place, the monotonous drone of white noise. Although it’s not just TV static and ambient hums; thunderstorms, waterfalls, anything to wash the day away… peppered with the soundtrack to Encanto? It’s around 11.47pm on a Tuesday night, when the whale song is breached by a EDM Minecraft track that his child accidentally added to his playlist, that he decides the family plan might be a wise investment.
04.
The inertia creep
There’s a reason why his Wrapped chart reads like a Buzzfeed “Things You’d Only Listen To If You Graduated In 2003” listicle. Our man’s musical taste plateaued in his second year of university and, like the Mega Aerodactyl in his Pokémon collection, there has been no evolution since. “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals is still his top track, while the rest is the same as last year – and the year before – if in a slightly different order. These are all tracks that he first downloaded through LimeWire, but he also owns the CDs, MiniDiscs and, in some cases, cassettes to back up the mp3s. “Crazy In Love” is fine, but when says he’s not sure about the direction of Beyoncé’s new album, what he’s talking about is Lemonade. He’s been listening to Linkin Park for so long that the clothes he’s wearing are about to come into fashion again.
05.
Captain hook
Since 2014, the average length of a song has shrunk by 20 seconds. And if you’re after someone to blame for a landscape where front-loaded, sub-two minute tracks jostle in clusters upwards of 20 on albums that still come in under half an hour, then look no further. It takes 30 seconds for a play to count as a stream, which is why his Wrapped stats don’t tell the full story, but you get the picture. His attention jumps from hook to hook, held by no one genre for more than a flighty moment. His most listened to song of the year was played 2.3 times. And while his playlist should be a bright, beautiful collage of all the colours of the musical rainbow, the effect is similar to pouring all of the poster paints together in a puddle: a sludgy brown. Don’t cross the streams.