Music Beyond Metrics

It’s that time of year again. Not the holidays, winter break, or the chilly season–I mean the time in which no one can seem to escape the question: “What’s on your Spotify Wrapped?” Spotify Wrapped, introduced in 2015, is one of the app’s most popular functions in which one’s listening habits are summarized into a personalized slideshow–top artists, most played songs and genres, and minutes spent listening. It’s a very common feature that has been implemented across platforms; Apple Music’s Replay, YouTube Music’s Recap, and Amazon Music’s Delivered being some examples.

As it is exceedingly common these days for listeners to post their summaries on social media for the public to view, the prominent question becomes: whose eyes are these statistics meant to reach?

What once used to be an interesting recap of my year in terms of music has turned into one of the most performative aspects of music-listening. My Instagram stories are littered with screenshots of various analyses and percentages–and admittedly, I find myself using one’s statistics as a sign of their overall taste, sometimes even going so far as to make assumptions about their personality. I tend to competitively compare my own statistics with others’, a habit which I am sure does not only apply to myself.

For the past five or six years, I have eagerly awaited to discover my summary from the year’s course because I like to see how it is different from years past, and I just like to know what I’ve been enjoying recently. However, over the years, the fun of it all has been somewhat diminished for me. I had started to become overly concerned with what others would think when they viewed my Wrapped and tried to make sure that they would see exactly what I wanted them to see; nothing else. I would go so far as to listen to my “real music” on a separate account and preserve my main one specifically for display. I know this paints me as pretentious and overdramatic, but I thought it was what I had to do with the environment that I was in.  In more recent years, though, I realized that I don’t have to share my statistics if I don’t want to. And more than that, even if I do, no one really cares. Not in a negative way, but in the sense that if I shared something objectively unconventional or questionable on my recap, people might notice, but by the next day, they wouldn’t remember me as “the girl who listens to weird music”.

One of the best things about music is that when one listens, it becomes personal–an articulation of oneself through another’s voice that makes audiences feel understood. When we get too caught up in what our end-of-year statistics are going to look like, we lose sight of what music is really supposed to do for us. Instead of becoming preoccupied about what our analysis will look like on the outside, we should consume music with the purpose of personal joy and expression–like it was always meant to be.