Spotify Wrapped can never trump the mixtape
Twenty years ago – before the iPhone, before Spotify, when Tony Blair was in Downing Street, Taylor Swift was in Nashville and TikTok was the noise made by a mechanical time-telling device – a tradition began among my friends. Every December we would each make a mix of our songs of the year – old and new, borrowed and blue – and burn a dozen CDs to be brought to a Christmas party at my flat, where they’d be exchanged along with the customary glad tidings, good cheer and over-mulled wine.
These compilations were a way of reflecting on what we’d been listening to in the past year and sharing musical discoveries with our friends – but they also told them something about what we’d been doing and how we were feeling, what sort of adult we were shaping up to be. They now feel like a relic from another age. For the end of the musical year is marked for so many of us by Spotify Wrapped: the streaming service’s annual viral marketing blitz in which it mines your data, pulls out your most-played songs and artists and dresses them up in some social-media friendly graphics, spitting out a customised six-hour “made for you” playlist at the end.
We are used to giving away our attention, data and identity for nothing – but even by the internet’s grim standards, Spotify Wrapped is a wretched gimmick. How depressing to allow the algorithm to determine our taste, to have the final word on what we like the most based on how many times we have queued it up, or to be thanked by a pop star for being in their “top 0.1 per cent of listeners” and amassing enough (individually, pitifully rewarded) plays to send them a Christmas bonus.
As a marketing tool, Spotify Wrapped is very successful – it briefly turns listeners into brand ambassadors as they share their end-of-year report cards with their friends online, eager to project a certain version of themselves or amused at how the reality of their listening fails to live up to their self-image. But as a reflection of our taste, it is a poor substitute for a mix or playlist curated by human rather than artificial intelligence.
I still have at least a decade’s worth of end-of-year compilations: around 100 CDs, with typed or handwritten track listings (and occasionally liner notes), cardboard sleeves bearing photocopied illustrations and strange, funny titles: “The Buddy Holly Hiccup”, “The Queen of Ur and the King of Um”, “I Bump Into Things”. Your Spotify Wrapped playlist holds a mirror up to your streaming habits: music that you work or fall asleep to will rank highly, artists will be repeated countless times and if you have young children, their passion for the Disney soundtrack of the moment will have put a stranglehold on your listening history. And it’s six hours long, because Spotify likes nothing more than to keep you in one place for extended periods of time (the bloating of albums and playlists in response to streaming algorithms is well documented). To make those CDs, constrained by the 74 minutes of audio they could store, we had to select, refine, edit, order: creating shape out of chaos. In doing so, a picture of our musical year emerged: listening back to them, I can see the contours of trips abroad, festivals, house-shares, jobs, relationships. All I tend to see in Spotify Wrapped is that yes, I am still addicted to Four Tet, and yes, I still return to Nick Drake’s haunting final album Pink Moon perhaps more than is healthy.
Having come of age in the 1990s just before the digital revolution, my generation is particularly prone to this nostalgic (you could even say tiresome) reverence for the mixtape. Though we embraced the iPod and were thrilled at the possibilities of streaming, we never quite got to grips with Spotify, where we still wander around – like a mad aristocrat in his enormous, draughty mansion – asking “where’s my library?” We love the instant hit of a new discovery but we spent decades building up a music collection and can’t quite figure out how to replicate it online. There are corners of our musical identity that have become dusty and unloved. We’re dragging our CDs back down from the loft and complaining about the price of vinyl.
Others have mounted powerful and eloquent arguments against Spotify’s business model – a much more important concern. So why does Spotify Wrapped – which is a gimmick, and nothing more – bother me? I think it’s because it represents another facet of our personality that we’re outsourcing to the tech gods. I want to keep my music close. I want to do my own wrapping. I might not be wheeling out the CD drive this year, but I’ll be making a playlist, paring it down, checking it twice (at least). I’ll be sharing it with the old gang. No doubt Spotify will mine it for data. If they do, they’ll find something of absolutely no monetary value – but precious all the same.
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[See also: Tirzah Garwood’s English satires]
