Why Are We All Obsessed With Spotify’s “Decade Wrapped” Feature?
We’re a mere month away from the close of the decade, and while we haven’t quite reached Y2K levels of panic, there’s a definite frisson of excitement in the air. All of a sudden, there’s increased pressure to choose your favorite cultural artifacts—not just of the year, but of the past ten. After all, how will people know what we’re really like if we can’t present them with an itemized list of our favorite things?
This week, Spotify has jumped in on the best-of-decade fun with a new personalized feature called Wrapped, which allows users to see their most-streamed songs and artists from the past decade.
Twitter is overflowing with people sharing their decade in music: some of the self-effacing, “I can’t believe I listened to this much Taylor Swift over the past 10 years” variety, others reveling in good-taste virtue signaling (we get it, you’ve liked Lou Reed for a long time), and some just mind-blown at how long we’ve been online for.
As I scrolled through Twitter’s reactions and parsed my own Wrapped results, I, Bradshaw-style, couldn’t help but wonder: What are we actually getting out of what amounts to a streaming report card? What’s behind our desire to have the past 10 years of content consumption wrapped up in a bow and handed back to us?
Maybe the answer isn’t so complicated. With the rise of cultural streaming services like Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu, we’re spending more time than ever before consuming content; the average American spends 23.6 hours per week online, up from just 9.4 in 2000. What the internet has to offer now is vastly different than it was 20, or even 10, years ago; where it was once associated with frittering time away in AIM chat rooms (2003, I miss you), “spending time online” in 2019 can mean reading, listening to music, watching films, or doing any number of self-improving activities.
That said, there’s still a tendency to feel guilt over time spent online. Maybe allowing Spotify to present us with a summary of our musical taste is a way of justifying the time we spend on that and other platforms, a way of saying, “Hey, I’m not just randomly listening to music; I am a person of taste.” (My own Spotify results, which heavily feature the works of Kylie Minogue, might disprove this theory, but I am, after all, just one person.)
Musician and critic Grace Spelman had a different interpretation of the Wrapped feature’s appeal, telling Vogue, “We want to say, ‘Here is a musical artist that makes me feel things!’ without having to be vulnerable with our feelings. It’s implied these songs and artists mean a lot to you, but you don’t have to do any of the hard work. You don’t have to say ‘I cried to “Green Light” by Lorde every night on the subway’ when you can just tweet, ‘lol “Green Light” is my top played. Big mood.’”
Whatever the reason behind its appeal, the Wrapped feature is a too-rare moment of levity and fun online, and it’s worth checking out if you’re curious about what the soundtrack to the movie of your life would sound like; just visit the Spotify website to view your own. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go bump “I Was Gonna Cancel” by Kylie Minogue.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
