In the past two years, music lovers and podcast listeners have had more time to stream than ever before.
No matter the uncertainty of pandemic living and the changes that comes with it, one thing remains the same: We all love to see our year “wrapped” in a nice little bow.
Being December and the month of looking back on the year that was, it’s time for Spotify to release its annual personalised wrapped experience for listeners around the world.
This year is full of insights on artists, songs, genres and podcasts that defined your listening in 2021 — all created just for you.
If you’re keen to get yours, eligible users can access their personalised Wrapped experience in the Spotify mobile app (iOS and Android) or on a desktop.
You should be able to navigate to your Spotify Wrapped via your home page, where you’ll most likely see a dedicated banner. You should also see a playlist section dedicated to Spotify Wrapped on your home page, which includes your full list of most-played songs from the year, as well as other related end-of-year playlists.
In addition to what fans love most about the previous versions, last year Spotify added a few new features to look out for such as:
— In-app quizzes allow listeners to test their skills at predicting the top podcasts, artists and even top decade they streamed most.
— Follow your top song’s journey through the year with Story of Your 2021
— New personalised playlists to help you make the most of what you listened to this year including Your Top Songs, which are the songs you loved most this year in one convenient place, as well as Missed Hits, the Wrapped discovery playlist where Spotify recommends releases that you didn’t listen to but that you might like.
— Listeners in Australia and New Zealand can dig deeper into some of their top artists of 2021 in On Record, a mixed-media experience that highlights your top 2021 artists.
Now, you might remember from previous years that some of the categories that pop up when you access your Wrapped playlist are very obscure.
The genres are the concoction of Spotify’s “Data Alchemist” Glenn McDonald, who developed an algorithm that assesses what a song sounds like or, as McDonald says, its “subjective psychoacoustic attributes.” Some of the rather obscure factors that go into determining a song’s genre include “tempo,” “duration,” “colour,” “modernity” and “femininity.”
The eventual genre, or genres, that an artist falls into is, in McDonald’s words: a “cluster of collective listening patterns.” And, if there is no existing genre to assign to a group of similar-sounding artists? McDonald just goes right ahead and makes one up.
So that is how we end up with categories such as “Stomp and Holler”, “Escape Room”, “Catstep”, “Shiver Pop” and all of the other head-scratching genres you’ll be likely to see your mates posting about in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, thanks to the recent addition of Spotify Lyrics, you can sing along with everything on your 2021 list — just in case you don’t know every word off by heart already.
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