Spotify Wrapped and the Platformization of Music

Within the world of music, the simple question of “What do you listen to?” circulates in all different types of groups and communities. Understanding someone’s music taste can expedite the process of getting to know someone on a more personal level and help you quickly understand someone’s unique tastes and preferences in sound. If we take a step back, music’s personal, intimate nature can provide an interesting mosaic of just how distinct each of us are as human beings and consumers of media.

When Spotify announced their “Year in Music” feature in 2015, the streaming service seemed to be taking on the challenge of visualizing and painting the picture of these distinctions and variations of music tastes across all listeners in a way that was palatable and shareable across different platforms. This initiative was soon polished into the “Spotify Wrapped” feature that users are familiar with today. But while Spotify Wrapped can feel like a simple personalized curation of your favorite tunes, a closer examination can reveal a case study on the platformization of music. The theory of platformization and the writings of media scholars can be used to describe the infrastructure of the Spotify Wrapped phenomenon as an intermediary which both connects listeners and creates a tailored media experience based on strategic data collection.

While Spotify’s “year in review” feature has been around for well over half a decade, this cultural phenomenon has come a long way in developing a list of top songs into a personalized and highly anticipated user experience. Its current version compiles around 10 months of data from January to mid October to be released December 1st to all Spotify users to scroll through and analyze for themselves. Spotify Wrapped not only includes your top songs and artists for the year, but also more invisible information like how many hours you’ve spent listening and where you rank amongst listeners for certain artists. Recent years have included more artistic and creative expressions of this data in the form of pictures and mood charts to track the general “vibe” of your year in music. Spotify even encourages the sharing and swapping of this information by including features which allow users to easily share their wrapped data to platforms such as Instagram or Facebook with the click of a button.

Rachel Metz, a Staff Writer for CNN Business, recounts her own experience with her Spotify Wrapped last year, writing “Like many other Spotify users, I opened the music streaming app on Wednesday and received a cheerful message: ‘Your 2021 Wrapped is here’... In all, I listened to 48 different genres of music on Spotify for 6,664 minutes this year; an amount of time that is more than 51% of other listeners in the United States, Spotify helpfully noted” (Metz). For most Spotify users, this experience is more or less the same. Spotify Wrapped reminds us of the infrastructure behind our favorite streaming platforms in one swift, tailor fitted stroke. Seeing our listening habits quantified and delivered to us in a clean cut way creates a satisfying, unique experience that allows us to share and indulge in the behind-the-scenes mechanics of what is otherwise a passive habit of listening to music in our day to day lives.

On the macro level, what Spotify is doing can be viewed as nothing more than a presentation of data to an audience of intrigued users. But scholars such as Nick Srnicek, a Canadian author and media scholar, would describe this as the platformization of the music streaming experience. In his writing on the topic of Platforms and Platform Capitalism, Srnicek describes platforms as “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact”, while going on later to explain that “these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable their users to build their own products, services, and marketplaces” (Srnicek). If we take a look at Spotify now - as well as before the launch of Wrapped in 2015 - we can see the digital infrastructure that Srnicek describes. Early phases of music streaming platforms were set up in a way that provided musicians with the opportunity to create an online space where they could showcase their music, track their listeners and even provide links to external shops and resources that they choose to advertise. Spotify provided this “series of tools” which enabled musicians to build their brand and extend their reach and accessibility to their art across all Spotify users. With Spotify as an intermediary, musicians are able to connect and engage with their audiences, making it, by Srnicek’s definition, a platformization of the music experience that we now refer to as streaming.

The more recent Spotify Wrapped feature can be viewed essentially the same way. It connects users with musicians in a more personalized way. In their essay titled “Reforming Platform Power”, media scholars José van Dijk, David Nieborg and Thomas Poell provide an image of platformization that examines the intermediary aspects of the platform from the angle of the consumer. In their essay, they describe platforms as “(re-)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalised interactions among end-users and complementors, organised through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetisation, and circulation of data” (Poell, Nieborg, and Van Dijck). Spotify Wrapped takes the existing platform that is offered by Spotify and brings it into a more narrowed down, specific version of platformization that not only connects, but personalizes a custom made experience based on the collection of user data.

Based on the definitions provided by the mentioned media scholars, it’s clear that Spotify Wrapped fits neatly within the definitions of what constitutes a platform. Wrapped makes use of the data collection from users, creates customizable experiences based on said data and works as an intermediary by connecting users with musicians and other listeners. Using the theory of platformization can provide users and scholars alike with an outline of how Wrapped fits into our world of social media that we live in today. But although Wrapped fits nicely into this theoretical outline, cultural trends in recent years have moved this unique Spotify feature towards a foggier region of platformization.

What was once a less used feature on Spotify Wrapped - the ability to share your listening statistics on Instagram or Facebook with the click of a single button - has dominated the culture surrounding this feature. When Spotify Wrapped hits its annual drop date in December, Instagram and Facebook stories are packed with everyone sharing their results and comparing their listening habits. This begs the question of whether or not the outer limits of the Wrapped can cling to the platformization theory that once outlined it perfectly. With more users opting to post their results to other media platforms each year, we encounter the issue of multiple intermediaries that disrupt the single platform concept of platformization. In other words, can the Wrapped phenomenon exist and have an impact across two different platforms while still be categorized simply as a platformization of music streaming? The interactions that once took place between a musical artist and a Spotify user become stretched thin as a user’s data is shared and moved to other platforms where conversations and discourse continue separate from the musicians whose platform and image perhaps lie solely in the realm of Spotify.

The ability for platform users to “build their own products, services, and marketplaces” as described by Srnicek only complicates these questions of Spotify Wrapped’s cross platform existence. By sharing your data and presence from one platform to another, you could potentially be mixing two separate personas or brands that have been built separately and without being designed to ever mix. Take for example musician, former YouTuber and pop culture figure Joji. On Spotify, Joji maintains a reputation of creating “sad boy” music. Songs like “Glimpse of Us” and “Worldstar Money” are littered across his Spotify creator page and have a somber, serious tone that demands a visceral reaction while Joji delivers heart wrenching lyrics on topics like loss and unrequited love. But on Instagram, Joji goes by the username “@sushitrash”, where he posts a combination of tour photos and funny pictures with his friends. If you scroll back far enough, you can see the social remnants of the man who started the goofy and eclectic “Harlem Shake” from 2012. No matter which way you cut it, Joji (or Sushitrash), uses these two platforms in very different ways to build his own personal brand.

If a user like Joji pushes their Spotify data into their world of Instagram followers, at what point do the platforms meet? These two different brands on two different platforms clearly were never meant to intersect, but the platformization of music listening data in the form of Spotify Wrapped seems to remove itself from its home platform to be able to be transferred across other media outlets and gaining different meaning from different users.

While we can point at scholars like Poell and Srineck and demand them to pick apart their theories on platformization for answers about Spotify Wrapped, I believe that this media trend is the next extension of what platformization can and will be in the future. While coming into the world of media separately, the online platforms that we use today may very well begin to lose their distinctions in the future as more phenomena begin to arise and mesh the boundaries between each other. While the theory of platformization can account for the interactions between multiple groups through one intermediary (ie. musicians interacting with listeners who interact with each other), it doesn’t completely account yet for the potential for these intermediaries themselves to be interacting with each other.

In the grand scheme of the digitalization of music on streaming services. The theory of platformization and the writings of media scholars can be used as an outline to understand the connections to data collection and the creation of intermediaries that serve as the basis for features like Spotify Wrapped. Due to the dynamic nature of media and platformization, I believe these questions can only be answered through the slow observation of what we have in existence already. When media anomalies like Spotify Wrapped begin to grow and evolve in the future, it’s the job of scholars and users alike to build a database of knowledge for us to update and develop in order to keep up with the ever changing nature of the digital world around us.