Every December, as the year begins to wind down, one thing comes to the top of every active music listeners mind: Spotify Wrapped. For today’s teens, the annual release is more than just a pop-up on Spotify; it’s a countdown, a personality test, and one of the most anticipated social media highlights of the year.
Spotify Wrapped is a colorful, eye-catching and highly interactive breakdown of each user’s listening from January to mid-November. It highlights minutes listened to, top genres, top artists, top albums, and top songs, turning almost a full year of music into a personalized story. Wrapped is intended to be fun, visual, and shareable, which is exactly why it spreads through popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The moment it dropped on December 3rd this year, students were talking about it nonstop between classes, comparing results at lunch, and posting their results on their stories!
To see how accurate and popular Spotify Wrapped is among our own Mills students, a short survey was sent out. The majority of the 36 students rated Spotify Wrapped as accurately matching their listening activity. The survey also revealed what artists influenced student listening this year. While Spotify’s worldwide Wrapped top artists included names like Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Drake, and Billie Eilish, Mills listeners showed a different mix of favorites. Students at Mills shared some overlap with big artists like Drake and Billie Eilish also appearing in their Wrapped, but there was also a noticeable range of other popular artists such as Tyler, the Creator, The Marías, Stray Kids, Beabadoobee, and many more, reflecting a blend of mainstream hits, indie favorites, and K-pop influences across campus.
A part of the excitement behind Spotify Wrapped is how effortlessly it combines self expression with entertainment. Young listeners love seeing their music “aesthetic” displayed in front of them, and Wrapped’s engaging graphics make it so easy to share their results online. It becomes a friendly competition, a great conversation starter, and a reflection of the different moods and phases listeners went through over the year.
While it only lasts a few days on social media, Spotify Wrapped continues to be one of the most enjoyed and talked about online traditions among young people, emphasizing that music isn’t something they just play to listen to. It’s something they connect with and use to express who they are.
