It’s interesting to see your year condensed into something as trivial as an Instagram story, but that’s exactly what happens this time of year. On November 29th, you and the other 574 million Spotify users have 365.25 days—525,960 minutes—compressed into a single slideshow. The day has become synonymous with reflection with a queer, indescribably empty feeling very similar to the one you feel at 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The flurry of the moment has been replaced by a melancholy resumption of normalcy. Seconds before you felt your stomach fluttering. Now, looking at the year laid out, you feel dissatisfied with the hollow nature of raw data.
“You spent 16 days listening to music this year.” The amount of time seems laughably short. 69 genres, encompassing rock, country, pop, and something called singer-songwriter. 1,615 artists, 24,040 minutes, and countless songs and albums. I listened to “All My Love” by Noah Kahan 62 times, most played on January 2nd. According to these statistics, my song-city is Kingston, ON. I guess people there are far more likely to be fans of The Tragically Hip, Noah Kahan, and Phoebe Bridgers.
Sure, the stats are intriguing when they apply to you. I can pinpoint periods of my life based on the music I was listening to. Fleetwood Mac was my top-played artist in May. That checks out: in preparation for graduation, I spent many lazy afternoons out on the track with friends, laughing while Stevie Nicks soothed our young, troubled minds. In July, this was exchanged for Taylor Swift as I spent my days at camp swimming, hiking, and dancing, the other counselors and I scream-singing the words to “Love Story.”
Perhaps the boiling-down of our beloved music to their most compressed form is what makes Spotify Wrapped feel so insignificant; it involves the removal of the emotions represented in the diminished chords and their eventual resolution. Music has to be about the memories it evokes, the relationships you have with individual songs.
Those 24,040 minutes don’t count the times I listened to covers on YouTube because I liked them better than their originals. They don’t count the songs I danced to at concerts, at Toad’s, or at prom; the times I listened to my friends sing around a dying campfire, or the times I played ABBA on my sister’s green record player as motivation for doing the dishes. Spotify Wrapped doesn’t count the music I blasted out of my friend’s car speakers, or the songs I ran to at late-night track practices, or the times I replayed “Teardrops on my Guitar” on an old Taylor Swift CD.
In a way, the statistics Spotify provided for me are starved of the memories associated with the music I listen to. They show only the skeletal structure of my year in music. To an outside perspective, my Spotify Wrapped is simply my music consumption, devoid of any further emotional significance. Seeing something as purely impassioned as music as a data set removes all meaning. Instead, I live through my songs of the year every time I play “Mr. Perfectly Fine” to reminisce over camp, or “Pepas” when I want to think of summer parties in Vivi’s garage, or “Stick Season” when I miss home.
