While Spotify Wrapped feels festive, personal data wrap-ups may not seem so fun and harmless from every tech company. And while it can be fun, it may make us pause, too, and think about the magnitude and potential drawbacks of such data collection. But rarely do they present such a glossy dossier of our activity, assembled much like a holiday gift. We know, for the most part, that our apps and devices are constantly logging what we do, and using that data to make decisions. Imagine, for instance, if your Spotify Wrapped list included songs beloved by a friend who recently passed away. He also pointed out that this kind of presentation of your listening activity could be triggering for some people in different ways. Gilliard, who does not use Spotify and admits he’s “like a surveillance killjoy,” likens Spotify Wrapped to other efforts by tech companies to package surveillance as cute or fun, such as Astro, Amazon’s dog-like home-security robot and Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. “That’s the trick: to make these things kind of go viral and appealing and fun in ways that occlude the harms of the extractive practices,” said Chris Gilliard, a visiting research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Yet as some astute Twitter users also pointed out, this marketing campaign is an important example of how a company can conduct in-depth surveillance of our personal behavior over a long period of time and package it as a fun feature that we want to share with others.Īlgorithms are everywhere. Panther).Īs of Thursday morning, a day after Spotify Wrapped’s 2021 release, Twitter search showed the hashtag “SpotifyWrapped” had been tweeted 14,000 times in just the past hour. “I’m a walking stereotype,” tweeted my coworker Donie O’Sullivan, whose top artist for 2021 was U2 (Donie, like U2, comes from Ireland).Įven the US Department of Transportation got in on the action, tweeting a top-five songs list that leaned heavily on transportation themes (it included “Drivers License” by Olivia Rodrigo and “Infrastructure” by St. I immediately posted a couple of screenshots to Twitter and saw many friends and colleagues had done likewise. Spotify knows a lot about its users because it tracks them closely similar to Netflix, it uses artificial intelligence to recommend music to you based on factors such as what you have listened to in the past.Īnd people, myself included, were quick to share Spotify Wrapped on social media. The music streaming company has presented it annually in early December for the past several years, in the hopes that its 381 million users (172 million of whom are paid subscribers) share these very specific details of their personal listening habits with friends. Spotify Wrapped is, of course, a marketing campaign, and it’s an impressively effective one. CNN's Rachel Metz listened to a lot of Dua Lipa and Harry Belafonte in 2021. Spotify Unwrapped is the music streaming service's annual collection of a user's listening habits. Oh, and my “audio aura” for the year was heavily green, as my top musical moods, according to Spotify, were “friendly” and “spooky.” In all, I listened to 48 different genres of music on Spotify for 6,664 minutes this year an amount of time that is more than 51% of other listeners in the United States, Spotify helpfully noted. A brightly colored highlight reel played, showing me what I (mostly) suspected: My top songs included “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa, “Banana Boat (Day-O)” by Harry Belafonte (a favorite of my kindergartener) and “Ship to Wreck” by Florence and the Machine (Florence and the Machine was also the top artist I listened to - Spotify Wrapped informed me I spent 699 minutes listening to the band). I cringed while tapping the message to learn more. Like many other Spotify users, I opened the music streaming app on Wednesday and received a cheerful message: “Your 2021 Wrapped is here,” it read, imploring me to explore the top songs, artists, and podcasts I listened to “in a year that was far from normal.”
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