Confused Why Your Spotify Wrapped Sound Town Is Burlington, Vermont? So Are the People of Burlington.

Lots of people go to Vermont to see the leaves—so many that some towns have taken steps to keep outsiders away in recent years. Now, Spotify has given Green Mountain State NIMBYs another reason to fear an influx of new arrivals: Its annual Wrapped feature has informed a host of people that if they want to find their musical soul mates, they should head to Burlington.

Every year, Spotify users are treated to a summary of their year in listening via Wrapped, listing the artists and songs they spent the most time with. For 2023, the company added a new feature called Sound Town, which named the city where residents supposedly had the most similar musical tastes to their own. Burlington is a small city, with a permanent population of around 45,000, but you would never know it from scrolling through social media posts this week: Whether they primarily listen to pop, indie music, or classic rock, many users were surprised to see that Spotify had identified Burlington as their musical mecca.

“Man wtf is burlington usa and why is everyone getting it,” one user posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, noting Spotify’s also-curious choice not to include the state name in its Sound Towns. Even the British singer Charli XCX was not immune from Spotify seemingly telling her she belonged in Vermont.

Spotify had a customized description for each user explaining why they got the result they did. Charli’s, for example, read, “People there are far more likely to be fans of Nico, The Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed.” But the artists cited in these explanations varied widely—Slate staffers who also got Burlington as their Sound Town shared that it told them it was based on their interest in artists as disparate as Orville Peck and Sharon Van Etten.

A Spotify spokeswoman said that Burlington was not actually all that common a result: Only 0.6 percent of Wrapped users got it. Other cities that came up a lot included Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading the LGBTQ+-focused site Them to run the memorable headline “Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You in Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay.” But 0.6 is still a disproportionately high percentage for such a small city, one that’s less than half the size of the more well-known Berkeley and Cambridge. What gives?

When Chris Farnsworth, a music editor at Seven Days, an alt-weekly based in Burlington, heard that his humble city was coming up a lot on Spotify Wrapped, he asked all of his co-workers to pull their phones out. He got Portland as his Sound Town, and said most of them got non-Burlington cities, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of the people who did get Burlington. “The people here who did get Burlington had wildly different music choices,” he said. “I’ve been really trying to figure out what metric they’re using to base it on. Really it just seems like they throw a dart at a board to be honest.”

Still, “part of me is like, ‘OK, maybe that’s a really nice compliment,’ ” Farnsworth said. “Maybe people are kind of saying there’s a scene forming here or something.”

Ian Doerner, the owner of Burlington Records, also felt like Spotify’s callout might be a compliment of sorts—vindication that Burlington is doing something right. “Even though we’re kind of a small city, and many people in New York City or D.C. would probably not consider this to be a city at all population-wise, we’ve honestly always swung well above our weight in terms of culture, music, and arts,” Doerner told me.

Bob Colquhoun, a volunteer at Big Heavy World, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Vermont-made music, agreed: “Burlington—and Vermont in general—has what I would say is an oversized per capita abundance of music,” he said. “For a small city, there are a lot of bands, a lot of music activities going on, much more than I’ve seen in other places of a similar size.”

“I would say that the taste is in general fairly sophisticated” in Burlington, Doerner, the record store owner, said. “I think that for the population that’s around here, the college students and the people who live here full time and the people who visit here, I kind of have the feeling that we’re one step more interesting than Taylor Swift. Not that I think Taylor Swift is not interesting. I think she’s great.” But music listeners in Burlington, Doerner implied, are going a little deeper.

Sources described Burlington’s music scene as eclectic. “There is a big singer-songwriter boom,” Farnsworth said. “The Noah Kahan thing has definitely had an effect.”

“We still have that sort of granola-y center,” he went on. “There’s still a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish stuff up here.” That might be an unpleasant surprise to some of the indie music lovers who got Burlington as their Sound Town, Farnsworth guessed. If someone were to actually move to Burlington based on their Spotify result, “They’d get here and like immediately see a Grateful Dead cover band playing and be like, ‘Oh, I fucked up.’ ”

Keagan Lafferty, an intern at Big Heavy World and a student at the University of Vermont, said she chose UVM because she knew the music scene in Burlington was really cool. If you want to listen to the kind of music the city has to offer, she recommended checking out the bands Moondogs, No Showers on Vacation, Hand in Pants, and Comatose Kids.

“I think that people would be fairly surprised at how vibrant this this place is,” Doerner continued. And if anyone wants to actually move to Burlington because Spotify told them to, he’d welcome that too. That is, “as long as they can get down with what we’re doing, for sure.”