I like year-end list season. I like an opportunity to remember and reflect on the records that stuck with me over the course of a year – especially when there is a chance to recommend something that others may have overlooked. I like looking through friends’ favourites for albums that I missed completely, and making a big listening queue. I like following along as critics attempt to determine the year’s “best”, even when I end up yelling into a group chat about how wrong they all are. I like it because it all requires looking back, racking your brain and processing your year in listening. It requires thinking.
This year, as Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds again, I am struck by how the whole concept seems to discourage that critical practice for something more passive. It nudges listeners away from deep consideration and towards accepting a corporate-branded scorecard reflecting a very specific perspective on musical value. It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.
What is lost when we entrust Spotify’s systems of data collection and interpretation to do our year-end reflections for us? What ideas and recaps are we not writing and sharing when we hand over that labour to tech companies who would prefer to automate our thinking? What playlist are you not making when you share the one Spotify has made for you?
As with other ways in which convenience culture infects music – from personalised playlists to prompt-based audio generation and beyond – it makes sense that some fans would receive their results, see the “share” button, and dutifully comply. But what’s at stake is a sense of our own musical memories, and our own personal archives of our years. When our own thoughts and recollections aren’t written down they can simply get lost. When we just accept that what a streaming service tells us about our music taste is true, there is much that we are not remembering, learning or celebrating about the music of our years and lives.
Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless. It is an especially urgent consideration in 2025, a landmark year for consumers being sold on this sort of cognitive offloading via consumer-facing AI. It can feel as though every day there is some new start-up prompt-based surveillance product claiming to ease the daily burdens of reading, writing, researching, summarising or brainstorming – but this is the work that helps shape how we think, how we make connections, what we remember and what we forget. It may sometimes feel unpleasant and it may require friction, but…
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