On November 30th, 2024, my TikTok ‘For You’ page was flooded with videos of disgruntled users in panic, begging to know why their Spotify Wrapped wasn’t here yet. It should be here; it is December 30th, after all.
Beginning in 2015, digital music service Spotify launched its annual marketing campaign, previously referred to as the “Year in Music” until 2016 when it rebranded to “Spotify Wrapped.” Each December, the campaign provides 574 million Spotify users with their product usage metrics over a year. Users can access their “Spotify Wrapped” directly within the Spotify app.
But why was everyone stressed?
This year, the campaign reached high levels of user anticipation as it was released on December 4, 2024 – the latest it has released in years (Spotify Wrapped was released on December 1 in 2020 and 2021; November 30 in 2022 and 2023). The marketing campaign earned its virality on social media by way of thousands of posts and stories made by users revealing their top five most listened-to songs and artists, a mass-sharing objective promoted by the app. What was a personal encyclopedia of one’s taste transformed into a published portrait of personal style, habits, and ethics at the disposal of everyone’s judgment. Now, users not only anticipate the release of their data metrics but rather eagerly await how they will answer the long-awaited, nail-biting, nerve-wracking question-
“Are you going to post your Spotify Wrapped?”
On the release date of Spotify Wrapped 2024 — December 4th, 2024 — singer-songwriter and brat hitmaker Charli XCX posted to her 6.7 million Instagram followers, “i don’t know why but i was really hype for Spotify wrapped this year. I just like it as a concept i guess.” But what is the concept of Spotify Wrapped, and why is it something that we use as a virtue signal?
The social phenomenon of the Spotify Wrapped Marketing campaign can be described as one of the greatest digital panopticons. Created by philosopher Jeremy Bentham and then later developed into a social theory by historian Michel Foucault, a panopticon was an architectural structure built in the late 19th century. It was utilized in European prisons to allow watchmen to observe occupants without the occupants knowing when they were being observed or not. Later, Foucault developed the idea of the panopticon into a social theory which stated that, people can be controlled when they believe themselves to be under constant surveillance.
Spotify Wrapped poses a unique scenario. People aren’t fearful that they are under surveillance by Spotify as a company. Instead, they fear the surveillance of their peers, who will eventually come to know all of their secret listening habits and accordingly, the social consequences that come with them. This idea is encouraged by the company through its tens of options to “share”. Spotify has even recently created a new sharing integration platform with TikTok which makes sharing one’s Wrapped even more accessible.
Throughout the year, when listening to music— arguably one of the most intimate, personal experiences a person can have — there exists a lingering feeling that what you are consuming will soon be on display. And this is exactly what the company wants. This panopticism keeps people listening to a certain artist more, just to see that they will be in the top percent of listeners by the end of the year, or listening to more music altogether so they have more minutes listened to than their friends.
The concept of Spotify Wrapped, as Charli XCX put it, accomplishes the same goals as a panopticon. In doing so, the mass-sharing of Spotify Wrapped has exemplified how in this current day and age music is no longer being consumed as an artform but rather a commodity that those who invest in feel entitled to and maintain in order to declare themselves a member of a certain club that subscribes to a certain aesthetic.
In a world where every action is a ritual of consumption or a virtue signal, Spotify Wrapped is the perfect example of large corporations’ efforts to transform even one’s most intimate, personal taste into an accessory to be flaunted.
Sources:
https://hightouch.com/blog/how-spotify-wrapped-works
https://medium.com/coffee-house-writers/social-signaling-through-taste-in-aesthetics-749899cac060
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham
