Spotify Tracked

ChatGPT was used in parts for the translation of this article from German to English.

The year is coming to an end, and in the media world, that doesn’t mean winter, Christmas, or New Year’s—it means yearly retrospectives, top lists, and previews. For several years now, there’s also been Spotify Wrapped, perhaps one of the best and, in terms of marketing, most effective end of year campaigns that takes up our feeds. It presents you with your own listening habits from the past year and encourages you to share them on social media.

Whether you find the flood of Spotify Wrapped posts enjoyable or annoying is up to you, but the campaign highlights the utterly absurd relationship between users and their data. Imagine it in a different context: A supermarket chain sends you a year-end summary of the items you’ve purchased, the time you’ve spent shopping, and what the store thinks you might want to buy based on this behavior. And for the rest of the year, you don’t receive any itemized receipts because, after all, you’ll get a summary at the end of the year. It seems odd. While I wouldn’t be able to know what I’ve bought recently, once a year, my personal data is presented to me in fun, colorful graphics, and I’m asked to advertise for the supermarket by sharing my shopping habits on social media.

With Spotify Wrapped, we accept that our own data is kept hidden from us for most of the year, only to be presented as a marketing gimmick every twelve months. But at this point, it’s worth mentioning that in the EU, through the GDPR, we do have the right to access our user data. In Spotify’s case, you can request data about your listening habits through your account settings. The data from the past year is delivered within five days, and your entire streaming history is provided within 30 days.

The files are provided in JSON format, which is great for further processing but still not something most people can easily work with. To me, this still feels like: “Let’s put as many obstacles in the user’s way as possible, hoping they give up in the process.” But at the end of each year, Spotify is more than happy to present everything in a simple and understandable manner.

Weird.

In the case of Spotify (and some other music streaming services), there is an alternative: Last.fm. There, you can transparently track your music listening habits yourself. I started doing this once I began listening to music not only through Spotify but also through my local Plex server. This way, I can view and explore my music data in one place, regardless of where I listened to it. The Last.fm integration with Spotify is actually very good and works flawlessly for me. However, this is definitely more of a solution for music nerds. My issue with Spotify Wrapped isn’t the concept itself—I love music and enjoy sharing my most-listened-to artists at the end of the year—but packaging it as an exception and marketing campaign feels a bit off to me. Being able to access my data in a clear and understandable way on demand should be the norm.

But if I’m honest, I don’t find it particularly bad in the case of Spotify. I’d be much more interested in having my usage data clearly presented on other platforms. I spend an enormous amount of time on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like, and I don’t get a year-end summary there. Even better would be to have a data dashboard readily available for regular users at all times. Reflecting on media usage is important for understanding both the media and ourselves. Having our own behavior presented in an easily digestible way could be immensely helpful in this process.

Not too long ago, I also tried to find out how much time I spend on YouTube. Data from the last week? No problem—there’s a menu option in the app settings for “time watched”. Anything beyond that? Not really accessible. Here, too, you can request your Google account data in accordance with the GDPR, but I don’t even really want to face that data pile. The ironic part: Ever since I subscribed to YouTube Premium, the app proudly shows me how long I’ve been watching YouTube without ads.

These platforms have the tools to present our data in a reasonable format. Spotify Wrapped is proof of that, and so are YouTube Analytics, Professional Accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and similar features. Wherever users serve the platform, such as content creators, these dashboards exist. However, users who simply use the platforms for consumption apparently have no right to receive their data in a clear, accessible format. This is wrong. Give me back control over my own data.

I actually see Spotify Wrapped as a positive development, even if it came about for the wrong reasons. On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, these year-end reviews maybe wouldn’t always be as lighthearted and entertaining, but they could provide interesting opportunities for reflecting on our media behavior. Which links did I click on most this year on Twitter? What did I share on Facebook? And did any of it actually bring me joy or add value to my life? These would be important steps toward a future where people could regain an understanding of how their world works.

So please, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube—where’s my rewind, my retrospective, my wrapped? And where is my truly accessible and digestible data?

Note:

While writing this text, I stumbled across Reddit Recap. It’s a year-end review that summarizes your activity on Reddit with a few graphics. It’s actually pretty good, even though Reddit doesn’t make up the majority of my time on social media, so the recap isn’t particularly exciting for me. Still, the same principle applies: This should always be accessible!