By Betty Ding (25A01B) and Cayla Goh (25A01B)
Blink, and it’s December. Another year has flown by, carrying with it countless moments and memories. But since 2016, one thing has remained constant: the anticipation of a present about your past, packaged nicely with vibrant colour and bold font – It’s Spotify Wrapped. Whether you’ve been looking forward to this all year or you’re apprehensive about that one song ruining your Wrapped, it’s time to face the music.
Unwrapping Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped is an annual recap of the music a user has listened to in a year. Unpacking the gift, it includes stats of how many minutes you’ve listened, your top artist, top songs, top genre…
Simply put, it’s your music taste summarised in numbers and rankings. And sometimes with hyper-specific alliterated descriptors.
Pause, why is the prospect of seeing statistics about our music taste so appealing?
We reach out to different types of music at different points in our life, so music can reflect the various stages of life we go through. Whether it’s the song that you associate with that breakup, or the song that you mugged to in Bishan Library, music holds memories in its tunes. With all that happens in a year, Spotify Wrapped crystallises 365 days into 1 graphic. It’s entirely personal, making it easy to reflect on the person we’ve been and are. It ties who you are in January to you, now, in December – almost like a personal time capsule crafted by your own listening habits.
It also shows your taste, or your loyalty to certain artists. Getting that Top 0.01% Listener for your favourite Kpop group shows and reinforces your love for them. Foo Zee Yann (25A01B) says that it’s like a badge of honour. It’s not a competition, but there is a leaderboard. There’s the satisfaction that comes with the proof of being a big fan. What you love forms who you are, doesn’t it?
It’s easy to share, too. The day that Spotify Wrapped drops, Instagram stories are filled to the brim with the same vibrant colours and bold fonts. It’s a present about your past, presented to others to show them who you are, what you’ve loved.
The people around us do affect our music taste to a certain extent. Say your best friend is obsessed with this new artist and in solidarity, you listen to this artist more too. Or, you exchange songs with each other because of how much you like them. Unknowingly, this artist might climb up the ranks and appear in your Spotify Wrapped (or other equivalents). Perhaps you and your friend even create a Spotify Blend to only discover yet another statistic, only this time it’s your compatibility in numbers. In the end, your Spotify Wrapped might not reflect who you are, but also how you’ve been influenced.
In some way, we want to be known. Perhaps the Spotify Wrapped statistics are not just about sharing your favourite tunes or artists – maybe it’s a way to have a greater glimpse into the inner workings of our mind.
Our desire to learn more about ourselves is not unfounded: According to humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, all humans have an innate need for self-actualization – the urge to understand and make sense of ourselves. Spotify Wrapped aids this process of understanding our sense of self by conveniently packaging this abstract concept into a digestible list – extracting data from something so deeply intertwined with our daily lives.
The same logic can be applied to personality tests – sometimes they can be used to affirm who we think we are, or to discover new traits we didn’t know we had. We don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, we exist in our own heads, in the minds of others–friends, family and even strangers–and in memories. We all have the way that we perceive ourselves, but it’s an exciting yet unnerving experience to see how others perceive us. Some consider their music taste to be a huge part of who they are. Spotify Wrapped is another way that people can see themselves through the lens of someone else.
Through music, you slowly define your year and your experience. Yet, music has the power to shape you too. It’s a symbiotic process where we end up learning more about ourselves – piecing together tunes to build a home you can reside in, with bricks of memories and new sides of you waiting to be found, still.
Maybe, we’re all trying to discover ourselves, one song at a time.
