The Problem with Spotify Wrapped
and everything else wrapped too
Greetings, salutations, and welcome to Working Through It.
Welcome to my new readers, my old readers, and everyone who can’t stand multiple year in review posts – you’ll want to sit down for this one.
Today we’re working through wrapped.
Wrapped what?
Almost everyone is familiar with Spotify wrapped, but don’t forget to check your Year in Books on Goodreads, your Letterboxd Wrapped, or – wait. How many of these are there again?
Spotify started it, but no marketer will ever let this trend die. The music streaming service started their yearly “Spotify Wrapped” event in 2016. It’s a really fun piece of culture allowing people to share their music listening statistics with others. There’s a point at the beginning of every December where everyone’s Instagram feeds are inundated with their Spotify wrapped.
Wikipedia calls it a “viral marketing campaign” and that’s an important detail we often forget to include. Every “wrapped” or year in review from any service is and always has been a marketing campaign. It gets the company’s name out there and pulls new users in.
While we can now look at as a shrewd marketing move, a VP at Spotify did an interview with Variety and said just the opposite:
“I’m sure we’d all love to sit down and say it was a marketing stroke of genius, but when it was first built it was a loyalty play,” he says. “I don’t think we had any idea that people would want to share it so much.”
It’s fun to hear the story behind wrapped. One chance decision can snowball into a massive cultural event. On one hand, it’s a cute marketing campaign that helps people share a little bit of their personality on social media. On the other hand, I think things have gone a little too far.
This sort of “wrapped” experience has quickly turned from marketing fad to standard practice for many companies. Thanks to Spotify’s continued success, it seems that every rewards program, subscription service, and social media has a marketing department absolutely foaming at the mouth to turn their analytics data into an aesthetically pleasing (and Instagrammable) screenshot.
I first noticed it with Goodreads. You can set a yearly reading goal and once you reach that goal you can look at your Goodreads Year In Review. Cool, it’s always interesting to see your reading stats, right? Same thing with Letterboxd – I just got an email from them telling me how many movies I watched, my most watched actor, and some other fun info. All of these are pretty normal, perhaps even useful.
I got an email from Reddit a little while ago. My Reddit Wrap up is ready? Reddit of all places! I had forgotten that I even had an account. You know how much I use Reddit? I browse the homepage maybe once a week while working on my Substack procrastinating. I haven’t even posted for the past two years, so what could my Reddit wrapped possibly look like?
I have no idea seeing as I lost or deleted the email (presumably deeming it of zero use to myself), but maybe it’s interesting for people who use Reddit regularly. I happily give them the benefit of the doubt.
Next I saw “Steam Year in Review” from the gaming platform Steam. Despite my love for the medium of video games and the supposedly oodles of extra time I have to be playing video games – I don’t play video games all that much. Thus, my year in review was nine months of zero gaming time, one month where I played and finished one game (Insomniac’s Spiderman) and another month where I played two hours of Lego Star Wars.
Thrilling, right?
The worst and most egregious wrapped I’ve seen this year was when my Mother told me she had received a Starbucks wrapped. It detailed her top drink (Caramel Macchiato), her favourite snack (petite vanilla bean scone), and how many cities’ Starbucks she’d been to (13) in the past year.
That was when the real shock and horror set in. The blood drained from my face and I howled in outrage. Must everything be wrapped? Can we not live in peace without knowing every little statistic from every platform we use?
Sigh.
In actuality, while my rage towards everything “wrapped” may be exaggerated, my indignation is not. Part of this comes from a few of the platforms I use giving me uninteresting statistics (trust me, I know how many games I played last year – it was two.) and another part comes from being confused. Who actually wants a Starbucks wrapped? Well, my mom does and she seemed quite happy with it, so I guess I can’t complain.
Yet there’s something more troubling behind these silly little marketing campaigns. For me, It’s an indicator of uneasiness and a sort of unique horror of the modern internet that comes to the forefront.
Everyone has at least a tangential story about how “my uncle was talking about dog food and then they got an ad for dog food, but we don’t even own a dog!” or something of that sort.
This is one of my greatest pet peeves about the internet – everyone thinks all the big tech companies are listening to us. Which, sure, I don’t have any empirical evidence to say that Google isn’t spying on you and wiretapping your phone at all times. What bugs me the most is the fundamental lack of understanding that accompanies this belief.
You know what’s really scary?
Google doesn’t need to listen to your every word because they already know everything they need to know about you. They have tracked every webpage you have ever visited and every click you have made on those pages. They know how long you viewed something, they probably know where you live, what your neighbours and friends are clicking on, and have a dossier on what to market to you specifically – that’s just Google’s info, shall we look at Facebook next?
See, the scariest part of the internet isn’t that a big tech company is constantly listening to you talk: it’s that they don’t need to. They already have the data we freely give away by using their products.
Even worse is that nobody really cares that all our online actions are being surveilled – it’s an unfortunately widespread lack of anger and a sin even I’m guilty of in my ivory tower.
People are scared at the idea that Google (or any other tech company) could be listening to them, but balk at the idea we are doing essentially the same thing by continuing to use their services. All of these wrapped or year in review reports seem fun and cute but conceal the horrifying amount of data big tech has on all of us.
Most of us chronic internet users have lived under this state of surveillance capitalism for a long, long time. It’s normal to us to not to have privacy and to be tracked at all times. We live in a world where the internet is synonymous with walled gardens and constant surveillance. In many ways, these big internet monopolies can seem good for us. I don’t have to log in to a bunch of separate services, I can just use my Google Account. We very easily forgot that the internet and life itself, didn’t used to work this way.
This is a much bigger issue than I have the time or words to write about, but suffice to say that the biggest problem with Spotify wrapped and similar year in review campaigns is that they are actually kind of fun1. It’s fun to share my tastes with people and I almost never think about how they got the data. Of course they’re tracking me, why wouldn’t they?
Spotify keeps their wrapped fresh every year. They specifically choose different copywriters and different highlighted features to keep their customers coming back. Most services don’t put anywhere close to that amount of effort. Instead of a fun and shareable look on your past year, you end up with a cold and lifeless graphic detailing your internet footprint. Some of it is fun, but I am more and more finding that it doesn’t have the same joy it used to have. Is this really what internet use is supposed to be about?
Of course, I (like everyone else), will continue to enjoy my Spotify wrapped, my Goodreads year in review, and any number of other services as they give me a tasty morsel of aesthetically pleasing statistics. Yet I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake the feeling that it’s all just a little bit scary.
News! News! News!
What a fun place to end the article. Yay for positivity!
The world dart championships just happened in England and fans turned out in a dizzying array of costumes of all shapes and sizes. Apparently it’s a tradition to wear a wild costume and have a generally good time watching darts. (via AP)
Reindeer, bison, and elephants (oh my!) at the Berlin zoo were given unsold Christmas trees as a holiday treat. There’s a video and it is glorious (via AP)
Some fun things entered public domain as of this year. The most notable is the cartoon Steamboat Willie and good old Mickey Mouse himself. There’s some fun parodies around the internet (which ironically would have been and still are entirely legal), but I expect we’ll see some interesting Mickey Mouse content in the next few years (via Duke Law)
assuming you have the time to use these services, of course. Otherwise you get a batch of data you already know about.