Wrapped is a model that has clearly worked for Spotify — the rapturous reception of its annual summary of a person’s listening habits features on more social media updates than one can attempt to remember.
Dec 12, 2024 14:32 IST First published on: Dec 12, 2024 at 14:32 IST
I chance upon Rosa Linn at 2 am on one of those rare nights when sleep has failed me. The lyrics of her number ‘Snap’ are unremarkable, or only as poignant as the next pop song. But there is something arresting about the Armenian musician’s voice — a soaring range, an effervescence that makes you linger. I listen to the song on loop through the night, feeling giddy with exhaustion and suitably exhilarated at having “discovered” a new musician to explore.
You would imagine, dear reader, wouldn’t you, that it would, having become a permanent fixture on my playlist, make it to my Spotify Wrapped, that annual marketing gimmick that makes listeners feel cherished even as it holds the music industry ransom to its inhospitable revenue-sharing model? I did too.
We were both wrong.
Instead, my Wrapped is a rap around the head, pointing at all that’s wrong with my taste — and with the corporate behemoth’s stealth-creep algorithmic patterns, built on data harvested over the time one has spent on it to push more of the same to listeners. What Spotify wants is not to provide you with personalisation, or motivation even to seek out new music and newer musicians. It wants to keep you hooked by addling you with stuff that sounds reasonably familiar and easy enough on the ears not to press fast forward.
Now, you could call my taste in music dubious, but never my range. From Tagore songs to Nina Simone, Mohiner Ghoraguli to Joan Armatrading, Simon & Garfunkel to Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez to Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga to Billie Eilish, from ’90s Bollywood to the almost-all-his-songs-sound the same Alan Walker and why-am-I-even-listening-to-him BoyWithUke, I have plumbed the depths so that no one with whom I make the mistake of sharing my schizophrenic playlists has to. But my Wrapped this year gives me pause. In an entire year of 13,335 minutes whiled away on Spotify, I can find few new musicians apart from Linn that I have listened to, having fallen into step with algorithms that have mastered how I listen over what I cherish.
Wrapped is a model that has clearly worked for Spotify — the rapturous reception of its annual summary of a person’s listening habits features on more social media updates than one can attempt to remember. And yet, the personalisation on Wrapped, outsourced apparently this year to AI, is impersonal and gimmicky — “That’s some serious dedication,” it purrs at one point. “Where do you find the time,” it jibes at another. The reveal of my top five songs and favourite artistes is a letdown; I have reservations about the stats (‘Falling Colour’ by Vanbur 52 times. Seriously?).
A lot of this apparently has to do with the company having laid off a sizeable chunk of its workforce in December 2023 in favour of an AI-powered upgrade. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said that the decision to lay off 1,500 employees caused greater disruptions than anticipated. The results are telling. But not in a pleasant way.
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Scrolling through my soundtrack to 2024, I realise that Spotify has forgotten why people come to music in the first place — to feel. That song by The Smiths a colleague sent past midnight to make light of a hard day at work, the one by Noel Harrison that you still haven’t managed to share with anyone because it’s so precious to you, the plaintive Moushumi Bhowmik number that your favourite cousin who died far too young used to love — music, like literature, is tied up in memory and nostalgia, in the personal and the convivial.
Brady Brickner-Wood writes in the New Yorker, “…when Spotify inevitably fails to deliver on the promise of being everything users need it to be — a record collection, an archive, a jukebox, a merch bar, a book of burned CDs, liner notes, FM radio, MTV, our favourite magazine, a conversation with a friend — listeners feel betrayed and existentially destabilised. If we can’t trust the apps to tell us a meaningful story about our art consumption, how will anyone, including ourselves, ever discover the idiosyncratic composition of our inner lives?”
It might be too big an ask of a corporation intent on maximising profit to be a record keeper of our inner lives, but perhaps, it could be a more faithful custodian of the background score to our fleeting days so we have an inkling of who we were and who we have become.
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