"Minutes listened to? Artists of the year? Hours spent in endless playlists? It all seems like joy, camaraderie, a party dedicated to musical vanity, but in reality, it hides another way of disciplining us: the more we believe our lives fit into one of those dashboards, the fewer questions we'll ask about who decides what we listen to and how."
"And yet, every time I see it parade across my feed, I experience the same feeling: are we celebrating the music itself, or are we celebrating that a platform has been monitoring us for 365 days and is now putting together an adorable presentation with all that data? They colloquially call it my annual summary, but in reality, it's theirs."
Spotify Wrapped repackages users' listening data into a viral annual ritual that frames personal music habits as platform-owned narratives. The feature normalizes constant surveillance by turning months of tracking into playful animated dashboards. That presentation masks algorithmic curation that incentivizes homogenized playlists and reward structures favoring similar-sounding or AI-generated tracks. The platform's business decisions include permitting targeted ads, including ICE ads appearing in teen playlists, while top global streaming charts can still reflect diverse artists like Bad Bunny. That combination reveals tensions between a marketed celebration of diversity and mechanical incentives that narrow musical exposure.
Read at english.elpais.com
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