Spotify year-end lists might give you the algorithm blues

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This article was published 06/12/2021 (1746 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when you can see that an acquaintance you barely remember from high school was really into something called “bubblegrunge” in 2021.

It’s Spotify Wrapped season. Every December since 2016, the music-streaming giant has packaged up the listening habits of its subscribers into eminently shareable infographics for social media.

As marketing campaigns go, it’s a home run; people love to flex about their impeccable taste in music or make self-deprecating jokes about their embarrassing (to them, because truly, who cares?) stats.

Your Wrapped likely doesn’t tell you what you don’t already know; presumably you were there when you streamed Olivia Rodrigo’s Drivers License — the most streamed song of 2021 globally, with 1.1 billion — thousands of times. Still, it’s content for you and advertising for Spotify.

I love music, I love data. And yet, oddly, I’m actually not a big Spotify user. I probably would be if I felt like I could safely listen to music on headphones during walks — thanks, misogyny! — but I do know that my own Wrapped would show I listened to comedian Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling approximately one million times — it’s my Song of 2021, hands down — and, from last year, Phoebe Bridgers’ Kyoto. (Also, this was the year I got extremely into female rap, so Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat would also figure prominently on there, too.)

There would be some old faves on there, too. The pandemic forced me into Comforting Listening, revisiting albums I loved as a teen — although I will say that blasting blink-182’s Enema of the State in a house you pay a mortgage on just hits different, as the kids say.

When I was mostly a music writer and when ‘Liking Music’ was a cornerstone of my identity, I used to agonize over my year-end top-whatever lists, obsessing over whether something was relevant or cool or important or whatever metric I was using. But one’s list is also intensely personal, especially if you’re someone who believes that you are what you listen to.

So, in that way, Spotify Wrapped is a delightfully democratic approach to these kinds of lists; you don’t need to be a music snob, critic or influencer to participate in a longstanding year-end tradition.

You don’t even need to be into the newest new; I love seeing lists that are dominated by cheeseball ’90s one-hit wonders. Spotify knows what you actually listen to. Seeing what your friends had on repeat in 2021 on Spotify is about as close as we can get to getting a mix CD from them in the streaming era.

To that end, I find myself wistful for a time when playlists were made by people and not by an algorithm.

From the industry at the top right down through to the tastes of someone’s cool older sibling, someone, somewhere has always dictated what we listen to; it’s naive to think otherwise. Curation has always existed in some form.

When I was growing up, I learned about music from magazines, the radio, MuchMusic compilation CDs, record store employees and friends. When burning CDs became a thing, that was our love language. There was a humanness to it, a connection — and of course, with the advent of Napster, some piracy to it as well. The advent of iTunes and, eventually, streaming would have broken my 14-year-old brain; I am from an era when you had to buy the whole CD if you wanted one song.

But then, I was buying CDs.

Streaming is only lucrative for an artist already making bank; for a smaller indie artists, we’re talking fractions of a cent per stream.

Montreal indie pop band Stars tweeted, “We had 406,000 unique listeners on Spotify last month. We cannot afford to pay ourselves a wage anymore. Happy wrapped, everybody.”

Singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards tweeted, “Happy algorithm day. Today’s the day where some might be emboldened to update digital copyright laws. Off to sell my plasma! (Still grateful for being listened to no matter which way you do).”

With that in mind, I love the advice being dispensed over at Mashable: “Treat your Spotify Wrapped like a shopping list.” Buy an album. Buy a single. Buy merch. Buy something, especially if your Wrapped included independent artists like those above, for whom a tour-killing pandemic is livelihood-destroying.

There’s so much music now, it can be hard to know where to direct your attention — and your money. Streaming services have radically changed how we find music; an algorithm makes it easier by serving stuff to you that it thinks you’ll enjoy based on your behaviour. Musical discovery, then, is a bit of illusion on a streaming platform. I miss recommendations from a friend breathlessly telling me, “You have to hear this.”

Besides, I don’t love the idea of an algorithm monitoring my listening habits. I’m a repetitive listener; I don’t need some robot surveiling me. If I want to listen to the Killers’ All These Things That I’ve Done 10 times in a loop and wax nostalgic for college, that’s my business.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti