Every year, Spotify users are gifted with a special reward for their listening. Spotify Wrapped has become something for every user to look forward to during the Christmas season.

Spotify tracks their users’ listening data throughout the year. They gather what kind of genres, artists, and podcasts each listener listens to the most. When December rolls around, every user gets to remember what their year sounded like.
Spotify reveals every user’s stats through a personalized animation. The animation is almost like scrolling though Instagram stories. Each “story” has a different stat on it.
One of the biggest statistics Spotify reveals to its users is the amount of time they spend listening to music during the year. I saw most listeners had numbers ranging from 15,000 to 100,000 minutes. As much as I like to think of myself as an extremely avid music listener, I was only in the top 86% of listeners in the United States, racking up 36,965 minutes of listening.
One of my favorite things that Spotify Wrapped reveals is how many artists I listened to during the past year. I feel that one of the greatest perks about using Spotify is being able to branch out and discover new artists easily. Between my favorite and newly-discovered artists, I listened to 1,149 artists over the course of 2021.
The Spotify Wrapped animation also includes a list of your top five genres. These are unique because Spotify does not provide genres like pop or rock. They go a step further and get even more detailed. Some examples of genres that users may find in their Spotify Wrapped are dance pop, emo, and new wave.
Something new that each listener received this year was an Audio Aura. Each user was given two words that describe their music taste. The words that I received were “hype” and “wistful.” Although these words are opposites of each other, I was not surprised by this because I love to listen to a little bit of every genre.
Each user also received a personal playlist called “Your Top Songs 2021.” It is complied with each user’s top 100 songs they listened to the most during the year. Additionally, Spotify created a playlist for every user called “Your Artists Revealed,” which contains songs from listeners’ most-played artists and interviews with them for podcasts. Both playlists provide a special way for all listeners to see how their music taste evolved over the year.
Spotify Wrapped brings people across the globe together through the universal language of music. Users can learn more about themselves and others through the gift of Spotify Wrapped.