The harbingers of Christmas are all around us. Twinkling lights. Heartwarming supermarket ads. News that your favourite musical genres are ambient, soul and something called chamber psych. Or maybe that’s just me, trying to decipher my Spotify Wrapped.
What exactly is Spotify Wrapped? "Spotify's 2021 Wrapped experiences, which tap into your personal data to recap your musical tastes for the year, launched Wednesday in its mobile apps worldwide," reported CNET last week. "This year's Wrapped includes new features like divining your 'audio aura', playing 'two truths and a lie' with your 2021 trends and making you the hero of your own movie soundtrack. As usual, the Wrapped experience also sums up your own top artists, genres, songs and podcasts, plus total minutes listened on Spotify."
Others have a more jaundiced view. "It might also be useful to get a detailed breakdown of where your streaming tenner goes each month," wrote the NME. "Something like, '£3: Daniel Ek's space rocket; £4.50: Universal Records power lunches; £2: AI defence tech; £0.50: actual musicians' – just as the artists do in royalty reports that should really be titled Spotify Shafted. Instead, once a year, we get a precise run-down of the acts we already know we like, ready to plaster all over social media like individual voting sheets for an Albums of the Year list that no-one will ever compile."
This is all well and good, but it doesn’t answer my own bespoke, personally tailored question: what the hell is chamber psych? I search in vain for the term on Google. I do the same on Spotify and am presented with playlists including everyone from Cate Le Bon to Fontaines DC to Low, along with the suggestion I should “see also: art pop, experimental pop, garage psych, freak folk, neo-psychedelic, electronica, indie rock, nu gaze, chamber pop, dream pop”. I could go on (Spotify does) but suffice to say chamber psych is less a musical genre than an algorithmic fishing net. Like all the rest of the Spotify Wrapped palaver, it pretends to be for you but it’s really for them.
Harmless bullshit?
Incidentally, this year Spotify also presents me with my own personal musical aura for the year. Nylon reports that these were made in collaboration with "celebrity aura reader and medium" Mystic Michaela, and are based on the mood tags that come with songs uploaded to Spotify. "You'll get two colours and the first one will be who you are, and the second one is what you reach for," Mystic Michaela explained. For the record, my aura is sort of blueish with violet tinges. I don't know which colour is which but it seems safe to file this particular bit of the Wrapped experience under "harmless bullshit", although with Spotify you never know.
I am an old dog and less than impressed with these tricks. Streaming improves my life because it allows me to listen with ease whenever and wherever I want to more music and more podcasts (Wrapped helpfully informs me I clocked up more minutes this year than 85 per cent of Irish users. Go me!). But the lingering sense remains that something else, something ineffable, has been lost along the way. What on the face of it might seem an inoffensive marketing gimmick like Spotify Wrapped may reveal more profound truths about how streaming is affecting cultural consumption. If the company is using its data to exploit our preferences and manipulate our tastes, some might say that's just a newer and more sophisticated version of a game that's been played by the music industry for almost a century. "Music genres have historically been business categorisations, defined by label executives and radio stations, and Spotify, ever-insistent on categorisation, falls into that lineage," Vulture points out. But in the analogue era, artists and audiences could occasionally band together to disrupt and reject those industry-defined norms for a while at least, until they were co-opted and commodified. If such things are to happen in future, it certainly won't be on Spotify.
Rooney unwrapped
These questions go beyond music. As Spotify pursues its objective of becoming an all-format audio service, it's competing aggressively for an ever-larger share of the spoken-word audience. These things can happen fast. It's only three years since Spotify announced ambitious plans to expand into podcasts. In October it claimed it had passed out Apple to become the US's biggest podcast platform. It recently purchased audiobook platform Fundaway, which already acts as an intermediary between publishers and digital platforms like Kobo and Apple Books, so expect the business pages to be reporting soon on copyright wars between Spotify and Amazon's Audible service. And don't be surprised if Sally Rooney shows up alongside Taylor Swift on your Spotify Wrapped next Christmas.
