My Spotify Wrapped Persona Is a 14-Year-Old Girl
It’s that time of the year again. The wave that brings supermarket Christmas puddings and creeping seasonal anxiety has delivered Spotify Wrapped 2023.
Faced with a 1.5 hour window of sleeplessness in the early hours of my southern hemisphere morning, I checked my email to find Spotify’s story of me and my year. I’m curious about myself, so I flicked through the colourful bouncy graphics to find out more.
I could not take my strained eyes off the technicolour multilayered sandwich that represented the 61 genres of my listening history. I made a mental note to Google look pov:indie. and Alt Z in the more respectable hours of the morning.
Back in the day, your best source of information about someone’s musical taste was the contents of their CD tower, or depending on their vintage, perhaps their cassette stash or even their vinyl collection. This screening of musical discernment as dating rite-of-passage was immortalised in the 1990s movie, Hi-Fidelity.
These days you can do your due diligence much earlier in the dating journey if a prospective interest has been savvy enough to link their dating profile to their Spotify account.
For reasons that will soon be revealed, I have not ever linked a dating profile to my Spotify account.
Spotify Wrapped tells me that my most listened-to artists of 2023 were Olivia Rodrigo, Dominic Fike, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. What’s more, I have a particular affinity with the residents of San Luis Obispo, USA who I’m told are far more likely to be fans of Fike, Rodrigo and Swift.
Apparently, it was Olivia Roderigo’s song “Vampire” that I really connected with. In fact, I’m in the top .5% of her fans and we spent 2163 minutes together, reaching a peak of intensity in October. She even had a special message for me.
I am informed that my music persona is a “Vampire”. Maybe they just use the name of your favourite song. Seems like a co-incidence. In any event, I am told: when it comes to your listening, you like to embrace a little darkness. You listen to emotional, atmospheric music more than most.
Who the hell is this person because it’s sure as hell not me. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with what I believe to be a line-up of fine artists. But I am not a 14-year-old girl, I am a 52-year-old woman.
This is what happens when you share your Spotify account with your 14- year-old daughter who is also a singer and likes nothing more than to belt out her most favouritist tunes to power her through her marathon showers. The everything shower is a Gen Z birthright and if you have a teenager it’s coming for your hot water bill.
I look at the 2023 play list and out of the dozens of songs, not one is mine. It’s not that I don’t listen to music, but my listening preferences are far too eclectic and scattered to trigger any algorithmic activity.
But then we turn to podcasts and it is my turn to shine. I completely dominate the field — 15,394 minutes, can you believe it? My ever-evolving collection powers me through slow traffic, long road trips and tedious household chores.
I’m not sure how the algorithmic powers-that-be know how to handle themselves when confronted by the fact that the same persona that has had a playlist called “Situationship — what are we” crafted for them is also heavily into podcasts on property investment, writing, psychology, neurodiversity and self-development.
Perhaps our Venn diagram of preferences intersects somewhere in the vicinity of the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast for which I can boast being in the top 1% of fans.
Our combined listening effort amassed 46,305 minutes. That’s 32 days non-stop, which is a lot of time in the car. And in the shower.
I’m unashamedly fascinated by the granularity of the data that Wrapped seems to so effortlessly throw up. I’m sure in some way it is important for me to know that peak listening month for Taylor Swift and Lana Del Ray was March and for Nessa Barret, August.
It tells me that 16 September was the biggest listening day of the year but alas it doesn’t shed any light on what was going down to make it so. Perhaps I need to check my diary. Or my electricity bill.
In much the same way, I’ve spent literally hours poring over the Medium stats page, not because I’m obsessed with writing success, but because I find the detail about who reads my work, when and for how long utterly compelling.
The Google maps timeline, gimmicky though it is, never fails to draw me in with its monthly snapshots of my movements, like a tech-savvy and detail-oriented stalker. It makes a valiant effort to make my life sound much more interesting than it is, given that the 34 “cities” are mostly suburbs and mostly within a 40-minute drive.
I think the truth is that we all are all secretly excited by the presence of someone (albeit non-human) to witness our lives and reflect them back to us; to tell us who we are and how we move in the world.
Now what I would really like to see is the two apps syncing with each like creepy mutually obsessed stalkers to provide a soundtrack to my movements.
Perhaps they’ll get it together in time for my visit to the fine folk of San Luis Obispo.
