As soon as Thanksgiving passes, the anticipation for this day increases more and more but the day has finally come. Spotify Wrapped 2022 is here.
The excitement that surrounds Spotify Wrapped is truly something else. I can’t think of another collection of data that warrants so much hype. Everyone can look back on the last year and have a general idea of what they were listening to, but the surprise appearances of songs you forgot about in your auto-generated Spotify Wrapped playlist and how many minutes you listened to your favorite music and podcasts is always so fun to see.
My personal favorite part of Spotify Wrapped is seeing how many minutes I listened to my top artist, which has long been Taylor Swift. The added bonus comes with seeing if you made it into the small percentages of your favorite artist’s top listeners, and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that this is something a lot of people look forward to. It’s like a little badge of validation that your love for their music is recognized in some way and oddly feels like a year’s worth of hard work coming together with a Spotify-branded bow on top.
The best way to describe the feeling of Spotify Wrapped day is that it feels like the day of your elementary school holiday party. The party where the room moms fueled you with enough sugar to last a week wasn’t until the last hour or two of the school day, but nothing productive gets done before then. I got a text from my friend that Spotify Wrapped was out while I was brushing my teeth, very quickly deciding I would be taking a look at mine on my walk to class. Admittedly, I spent at least 10 minutes of class time on my phone looking at the Instagram story-like format of my Spotify Wrapped and sharing it with my friends. I lost track of how many people I talked to about it throughout the day when I was definitely supposed to be doing other things. It’s like if getting your ACT score in high school was a million times more fun.
Spotify Wrapped is especially fun for anyone who enjoys being a little bit nosy. It’s a blast to compare your top artists and songs to your friends’, but seeing everyone you know on social media posting theirs gives you a little insight into what they listen to. Even the mildly cursed things that can show up on one’s Spotify Wrapped are still fun little insights into what they’ve been up to for the past year.
Of course, there are other music streaming services that have something similar to Spotify Wrapped like Apple Music Replay, but they just aren’t the same. It’s nice to be able to talk with those in your life that use Apple Music about what they’ve been listening to this year, but the data that Spotify gives users is so much more unique. The company switches up the random little things they use the data for each year, giving users fun surprises to look forward to each year. Do I know what my listening personality Spotify gave me means? Not at all, but I love it.
Between comparing this year’s Spotify Wrapped to last year’s and finding out that a song from “Glee” is in your Wrapped playlist from this year, I hope the joy Spotify Wrapped brings people every year never goes away.
Tate Raub is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Tate know by tweeting her @tatertot1310.
Opinion Editor
