At the end of every year, Spotify releases perhaps its most adored feature, Spotify Wrapped. Spotify Wrapped is a summary of the past year of your music listening, providing insight into your favorite songs, artists, and genres. Spotify creates playlists and graphics based on all your Spotify favorites, revealing an aesthetic and entertaining view of your music in review. Spotify Wrapped showcases this information in an easy to share format, allowing users to compare music tastes with other Spotify users. Spotify competes for the best music platform year after year, consistently providing features like Spotify Wrapped that make it one of the best music streaming platforms.  

Spotify Wrapped, released in December every year, provides aspects of personalization, engagement, and shareability. Spotify Wrapped starts with the number of genres that you listened to. This year, this information was portrayed via a visual display, allowing users to see the genres that they listened to the most. Another beauty of Spotify Wrapped is its data visualization. Next, Spotify Wrapped suggests a location that matches best with your music taste. For example, this year, my location was Boulder, Colorado. This pairing was made because popular music in Boulder matches my music taste the best.  

Next, Wrapped shows how many songs you listened to in total, with your top 5 most listened to songs to follow. This allows the user to see where their attention was devoted to, sometimes subconsciously. When experiencing your Spotify Wrapped, it is hard not to bob your head to all of your favorite music that is displayed in this review. For this reason, Spotify creates a playlist filled with all of the users most listened to songs. This playlist is able to be saved and listened to indefinitely. This is perhaps one of my favorite Spotify Wrapped features, as it creates a time capsule of all of your best songs.  

The next best feature is the “total minutes listened” portion. This feature provides a total of all Spotify minutes listened, then pairing equating it to the number of total days listened. For example, this year, my minutes were upwards of 50,000, equaling out to about 36 days of straight music. This was incredibly eye opening, as I know that I listen to music, but not at that capacity. From there, Spotify showcases your most listened to artists, numbered one through five. This is a captivating feature because it allows you to see how your attention was divided, but it also allows you to compare top artists with other Spotify users. Spotify gives your artists a chance to say thanks via a recording from the band. For example, this year on my Spotify Wrapped, a video from Greta Van Fleet was included in my wrapped, thanking me for being one of their top listeners. Once again, Spotify hits home by providing an aspect of personalization to thank Spotify users for using their service. In addition to music data insight, the platform also showcases the users time spent listening to podcasts, and then wraps it all up by creating a shareable template that showcases all the data on an easy-to-share snapshot, allowing users to share their data with others.  

This year’s Spotify Wrapped captured data visualization, shareability, and personalization in a whole new light, allowing music lovers everywhere to see why Spotify is the greatest music streaming service to date.  

Sadie Blace is a Dakota Student General Reporter. She can be reached at [email protected].