Opinion Are you a Bebo era main character, or just a Basic Swiftie – why we put up with Spotify’s Wrapped

Your Spotify Wrapped could say everything about you — or nothing at all. For the uninitiated, “Wrapped” is Spotify’s way of presenting data about your tastes in music and general listening behaviour in a pretty little package. Users get a list of the five songs and artists they listened to most that year. For some, that’s Bob Dylan, others Diljit Dosanjh. Then you learn just how much time you have spent (or wasted) — 2,257 minutes of music and a few more hours of podcasts, for example — and that the city that reflects your music taste is Pune. Wrapped will also affirm your identities – people are Swifties or Beliebers. There it is, then, a validation and a social media post, premade by Big Tech.

Of course, we know that such a curation is just about getting your data. That Big Tech is constantly mining our data is not a revelation. Data breaches and privacy concerns have been part of the public conversation since at least 2018. That was when a Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, disclosed information about critical data breaches by Facebook to The Guardian and The New York Times. Wylie collected personal information from Facebook to create political and psychological profiles and sent targeted political ads — allegedly influencing voter choices and entire elections.

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But with Spotify Wrapped – as with so many an online gimmick – there is no need for a data “breach”. We voluntarily share the information because it comes wrapped in a cute package, bright distracting colours, background scores and validation. And then there’s the never-ending monetisation of our digital pasts: From the sad girl Mitski era and girl rage Olivia Rodrigo era to the main character energy Bebo era.

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We put up with this commodification of our cultural life because there is generally something to learn from it. For instance, my cousin’s (a new parent) song rankings went as follows: 1) Wheels on the bus (a nursery rhyme); 2) Baby Shark; 3) Itsy Bitsy Spider… you get the gist. My friend’s top artist was the same as mine (not Taylor Swift, she lamented) and texted me saying, “I’m not even ashamed of it. I’m just wondering if I should stop hanging out with you.” So your Wrapped could reflect what your life has been like, as it did for my cousin who had a baby, or it could just, you know, make or break friendships. Either way, there’s something to take away.

adya.goyal@expressindia.com