The long-awaited 2023 Spotify Wrapped came out on Wednesday last week! Giving listeners a look at their year in music, Spotify gives you:
- A list of your top five genres
- Your “sound town”
- Your top song and how many times you listened to it this year
- Your top five songs
- A playlist of your top 100 songs
- How many minutes you listened this year
- Your top artist as well as the other four in your top five and which month you listened to them most
- The song you “couldn’t get enough of” from your top artist
- A “Me in 2023”
- And finally, a graphic that gives you all of your most important information to share with your friends.
Spotify Wrapped first started in 2015, but instead went by “A Year in Music.” The feature didn’t get much attention until 2017 when Spotify visually revamped it and changed the title to its current form.
How does it work? From January 1st to October 31st, Spotify uses its algorithms to keep track of your listening habits and then puts all of the information into the bright and colorful Spotify Wrapped slide show at the end of the year.
The two new editions to the Wrapped data are “sound towns” and “Me in 2023”.
“Sound towns” takes some of your most-listened-to artists and assigns you to a city in your country that also tends to listen to those artists. For example, my sound town was “Flagstaff, Arizona, USA” because I listen to Chloe Moriondo, mxmtoon, and Khai Dreams.
Finally, for “Me in 2023”, Spotify looks at your general listening habits and assigns them to one out of 12 possible characters and a description of how your listening connects to that character. For example, you could have been assigned the Time Traveler: “Have we met before? You travel back in time and listen to songs on repeat, again and again. The best tracks never get old.” Or you could have been assigned the Shapeshifter: “One moment you’re head over heels for an artist. The next, you’ve moved on. Some say it’s erratic. We call it eclectic.”
Because of the popularity and success of Spotify Wrapped, other audio media streaming platforms also do something similar: for example, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and even non-music apps like Pocket Casts. Safe to say, this feature will continue to be an important factor that Spotify uses to attract new users.
