Spotify Wrapped and the Ephemerality of Streaming Culture

Late night thoughts about what our annual music review tradition says about 2024

Every year, I patiently wait for Spotify Wrapped to come out in late November or early December and confirm to me what I already know - that I listened to a lot of Green Day and found myself oddly obsessed with a particular few pop songs (this year, it was ‘Underneath Your Clothes’ by Shakira¹). It’s become a ritual that I treat with some trepidation each time it comes around, but it’s hard to deny how much it’s worked.

Wrapped was a massive success for the streaming giant, and its influence has spread to all of their main rivals in the industry - Apple Music began a year-end roundup in 2019, which has graduated to have monthly smaller reviews and a big celebration similar to Wrapped in 2022; Tidal and YouTube Music began to release “rewind” features in 2020. But Spotify’s advertising campaign remains the largest of all of these, and Internet memes spread about Wrapped for weeks before it actually comes out; they’ve mastered the social media landscape and can convince fans to do their dirty work for them.

I don’t have any particular attachment to Spotify as opposed to other streaming services - I started using it in 2017, mostly out of familiarity, and quickly spread the gospel to my family so that my parents would shell out for a premium plan that I’m leeching off.² But it’s very definitely changed the way that I listen to music, and the way that society does as well, and looking at Wrapped’s year in review gives an opportunity to contrast this against other forms of listening.

For many people, Spotify is the be-all and end-all. Algorithimcally produced playlists of currently trending hits, grouping everything into soundalike genre matches, promoting new releases from the major artists while trying to hide that they get paid to do so. And for those who use it like that, Wrapped probably is the biggest reflection of what they did listen to during the year. But I have a sizable collection of offline music, stored on a hard drive plugged into my laptop that I listen to with the foobar2000 music player. Spotify doesn’t know that I listen to music in this way - and they probably wouldn’t like it if I did - and it means that discrepancies can arise. And they did, for a measurable fact, this year.

I don’t know when exactly Spotify stops counting your data for the purposes of Wrapped (it’s previously been reported as October 31^st, but they pushed back against that in a social media post, so it’s presumably some time in mid-November), but my listening habits in the last two or three weeks haven’t been enough to produce any huge shifts in listening data. So when I bring the music tracking site last.fm online - which has been operating for twenty years, can be plugged in to almost any streaming service or digital music player, and produces its own Year in Review in the first few days of January - and look at my plays for 2024, I get a somewhat different top five:

Spotify top five artists

1. Green Day

2. Manic Street Preachers

3. Pavement

4. Elliott Smith

5. Placebo

last.fm top five artists

1. Manic Street Preachers

2. Modest Mouse

3. Green Day

4. Bright Eyes

5. Björk

Spotify top five songs

1. Shakira - ‘Underneath Your Clothes’

2. Shakira - ‘Objection (Tango)’

3. Roxette - ‘The Look’

4. The Postal Service - ‘Such Great Heights - Remastered’³

5. The Postal Service - ‘Nothing Better’

last.fm top five songs

1. The Postal Service - ‘Nothing Better’

2. Shakira - ‘Underneath Your Clothes’

3. The Postal Service - ‘Such Great Heights’

4. Björk - ‘Jóga’

5. Roxette - ‘The Look’

These lists are similar, of course, but not identical. I still listen to Green Day a lot. But the cause of the difference between the two is by the nature of their formats - foobar2000’s playlist view⁴ encourages albums to be listened to as distinct pieces, Spotify encourages you to sift through songs and jump between playlists. And that’s exactly how it’s impacted my listening habits. When I’m sitting at my laptop, with my headphones plugged into the 3.5mm jack and a folder of downloaded music open, I’m going to listen to a record as a whole unit of music. When I’m on the bus, with my headphones connected to my phone via Bluetooth, I’m going to try and think of a song that’s playing on my mind and listen to that, and then listen to whatever Spotify’s autoplay gives me until I can think of something new - and repeat that until a fixation has taken place, one that’s going to end up on my Wrapped in December. This is how I end up listening to enough of a band outside of their studio albums for them to reach the high points - it’s easy for me to remember that I like ‘Basket Case’, it’s much harder to remember how I feel about a Modest Mouse deep cut like ‘A Different City’.⁵ And this familiarity ends up repeating the whole situation - while I may have ‘A Different City’ locked somewhere in my head, the fact that it doesn’t come to the front when I read the title means that I’m not going to click on it to listen outside of my next playthrough of The Moon and Antarctica.⁶ I have Björk’s first four albums downloaded onto my hard drive, and so when I’ve listened to Homogenic and Vespertine a lot this year, it’s been playing the files and getting them tracked through last.fm and not Spotify. Even when I’m listening to a band more methodically, and trying to go through their expanded discography, the download vs. stream problem brings into account these discrepancies - I don’t have the Pavement discography downloaded, and I played it through Spotify, but I do for Bright Eyes⁷ and I played that offline.

“So what’s the point here?”, you might ask. “You’re embarrassed that the time you spent listening to Know Your Enemy (the Manic Street Preachers one) wasn’t on Spotify, and couldn’t overtake the time you spent listening to ‘Know Your Enemy’ (the Green Day one).” And yes, there’s a little bit of cultural cringe here. But the key argument of this loose bloggy ramble is that Spotify Wrapped is part of the broader shift that if you can’t see it easily, it doesn’t exist. If it’s not on a streaming service, instantly accessible but locked behind glass, it may as well be on the other side of the moon. As much stuff as there is on Spotify, there’s an endless pile of stuff that hasn’t emerged onto there - and true, while a lot of it is hyperobscure noise music that I’d feel weird about streaming through the same platform I listen to ‘All the Things She Said’ by T.a.T.u. on, sometimes it can break out into disrupting the pop landscape. Neil Young’s two-year protest against Spotify’s platforming of Joe Rogan⁸ was a principled stand that brought some significant attention to his cause, but few of Spotify’s primarily young audience would be getting into Neil Young without just downloading his music off web stores anyway. But we had a pop album break through in 2024, one that shows up this culture even further.

In March, Cindy Lee - the hypnagogic pop project of former Women guitarist Patrick Flegel, renowned for its subversion of 60s brill building pop and gender roles within music - released the two hour, thirty two song Diamond Jubilee, an album that quickly broke through of its niche appeal into a weird kind of anti-mainstream fame. It spread like wildfire on RateYourMusic⁹ and was the number one album of the year for a few weeks on the website, a feat repeated when Pitchfork (which gave it a 9.1 in April) named it as their album of the year in December. When Pop Crave, the social media aggregator with 1.9 million Twitter¹⁰ followers, reposted the Pitchfork top ten list, much of their audience reacted with disdain - not only was an album that they’d never heard of at the top of the tree, ahead of Charli xcx’s Brat, but it was something that they couldn’t even stream on Spotify!¹¹

The avoidance of mass streaming services was a very deliberate choice from Flegel, especially ducking out of Spotify - the Geocities website that was, until October, the only way to download Diamond Jubilee cited CEO Daniel Ek as “a thief and a war pig”. It’s become more and more apparent over recent years that Spotify’s business model is based on the devaluation of music as an art, and while Flegel may have had other motivations to avoid the spotlight (the tour for the record was abruptly cancelled a few weeks in), his stance is an important position to take against the current cultural trend. Artists have bent towards Spotify’s will by making shorter songs (some sources have mentioned the average length of a charting song is shorter now than at any point since the 1960s), but whatever they don’t put up there the fans will anyway - a quick search on the app will bring up endless short “podcast episodes”¹² of unreleased tracks from rappers, live recordings from Taylor Swift’s current tour, and anything that hasn’t been placed on the streaming service but that people think should be there. Sometimes this has gotten too hard to resist, and artists have conceded to the demands of the mob - Leyland Kirby put his infamous six-hour dark ambient project Everywhere at the end of time on streaming services in December 2023, bemoaning those who “endlessly tried to monetise and exploit the work by repeatedly uploading it”. Already acclaimed by music critics, a bestseller on Bandcamp, and a pioneering plunderphonic artist, maybe The Caretaker can finally receive recognition when he appears on an Instagram story in someone’s top five of the year.

The problem of music being trapped on streaming services isn’t as bad as it is for television and film - films are taken off Netflix much more frequently than albums are taken off Spotify, and while the trend of multiple variants for vinyl releases of pop albums is damaging enough on its own, it’s still spread more widely than the total lack of physical release some trending films might face (Killers of the Flower Moon, a film that earned ten Oscar nominations, is impossible to purchase a DVD or Blu-Ray copy of). But the overall slide towards the digital being the primary medium is a dangerous trend, and one that could break on itself at any time. Taylor Swift has had her music off Spotify for years at a time in the past, and pulling her music off would give a significant blow to the app - maybe that kind of scare would be necessary to reverse this cultural shift.

1. Which is, at least, comparable to some of the moody slowcore songs that I would listen to otherwise.

2. Disclaimer: I would be unlikely to switch to Apple Music. I own a Google Pixel as opposed to an iPhone, and much of my online presence is wrapped up in a Google account; the last thing I need is to give Apple a hook to spread my information across there as well.

3. I paid for last.fm premium so that I could remove remastered tags. Yes, I might be a sucker.

4. Or at least the view that I’ve set it to.

5. This is loosely linked towards a project I’ve thought about doing - experimenting with deliberately limiting my musical options for a few weeks, perhaps by purchasing an MP3 player with a small storage capability and stopping myself from listening to anything else. But that would be for a future blog post!

6. For fairness’ sake, I listened to it after I picked it out as an example - there’s a few tracks from the record that I like more, so it probably wouldn’t be one I’d regularly listen to anyway.

7. Apart from their 2024 album Five Dice, All Threes - it’s alright, although more depressing than usual considering Conor Oberst played a disastrous show just days before the record came out and had to cancel the entire tour subsequently.

8. Although, Neil being Neil, he couldn’t help but make some jabs about streaming audio quality at the same time.

9. One of my regrets is that I downloaded this in April, when a few forward-thinking friends on Discord started posting about it - thank you Amber - but didn’t listen to it for several months, by which point the hype had exploded out.

10. Fuck off.

11. I decided I would rather listen to other music than the podcast episode while I wrote this - a pretty typical choice for me, and why I don’t really listen to podcasts - but my friend Lisa sent me an episode of Panic World arguing that Pop Crave serves as “the modern day AP” on Twitter, an interesting premise that might lead to me expanding this essay in future.

12. Spotify is very insistent on getting you to listen to its podcasts, presumably because that minimises the amount of money that they actually have to pay out to what’s getting listened to.