All Wrapped Up

Students share their Spotify Wrapped stats

To wrap up the year, the streaming service, Spotify, shows users their top artists, songs and genres of the year with an interactive slideshow. Listeners enjoy seeing their top categories and sharing them with their friends.

Story by Ember Klein

“It’s really fun to look back over the past year and see what you’ve listened to and also just compare music vibes with your friends,” sophomore Simon Williams said.

Some users believe that their Wrapped is not the best present though. Users have criticized the way that Spotify makes playlists.

Spotify comes with three different versions:

Spotify premium, a five dollar per month service with no ads, freedom to choose what songs to listen to when you want, and the ability to make short playlists without Spotify adding songs automatically.

A free version on computers that has ads, but the ability to choose the songs you want to listen to now, and adds songs naturally to short playlists.

A free version on mobile phones with ads, limited song choice, and Thompson’s biggest concern, limited song choice on small playlists.

Although the day that Spotify Wrapped drops is joyous for its users, some are frustrated by the problems that the musical summary has in its algorithm. Students like sophomore Mallory Thompson, have posed problems with the way that Spotify’s free version makes playlists.

“When you have playlists, they put other songs that they think you’ll like at the end of it and then that becomes your most played song,” Thompson said.

Because of the way that Spotify adds songs to short playlists, music that users may have not chosen can become some of their top songs. This can be frustrating to users with the free mobile version, they have much less freedom to choose the music they want to listen to and can be stuck with what the algorithm picks for them.