If you, like countless other Spotify users, awoke on Wrapped Day earlier this week to discover a listening age that felt like it was reading you for filth, I’m here to help.
ICYMI, the music streaming service delivered its annual Wrapped report to individual users on Wednesday, prompting many fans to either excitedly brag about the underground artist they totally discovered or quietly cringe at the guilty pleasure track they’d rather conceal.
But in between all the big reactions, one of the most-shared categories of this year’s Wrapped was the listening age, in which the all-knowing algorithm determined how old you were based on the tunes you spun throughout the year.
For many, the results felt wrong. In amongst a flurry of social media reactions and memes, the general sentiment felt something like; ‘I’ve been listening to Sabrina Carpenter and Doja Cat all year — why am I 73?’.
Well, Spotify has come along and answered our questions and like most tech companies, it’s all to do with the titillating topic that is… data.
How did Spotify calculate my listening age?
According to its website, Spotify calculated users’ listening age by comparing their overall music interest to that of their actual age, which they would’ve entered when joining the app.
Rather than determining the average age of your fave musicians, Spotify collated the release dates of all your most-streamed tracks throughout the year to find the five-year span of music you engaged with the most.
It then determined whether you engage with that five-year span — be it in the 70s, 90s, or 50s for all my Presley stans — more than other users your age. Go far enough back and you will land in the Stone Ages, but IDK if caveman had worked out how to get throat singing tunes on streaming back then.
What is a “reminiscence bump”?
Anyway, after isolating your most-loved five-year span, Spotify added what it calls a “reminiscence bump”, which is not something offered to you in the toilet at a rave, but an assumption that you would’ve been in your “formative years”, i.e. 16 to 21 years old, when the songs from that era were released.
As Spotify explained, “If you listen to way more music from the 70s than others your age, we playfully hypothesise that your ‘listening’ age is 63 today, the age of someone who would have been in their formative years in the late 1970s.”
Put simply, Spotify imagined a hypothetical current age based on how old you would’ve been when songs from your most-streamed eras were released. In some cases, this was separate from your top songs, albums and artists, since it drew from five-year spans of the past.
But if all you spun was recent music (Carpenters and Kittenz, ascend!), your listening age probably aligned pretty closely to your actual age.
It all sounds like a heap of data mambo-jumbo, and who knows, it could just be Spotify rage-baiting us.
I certainly felt rage-baited on Wrapped Day, but only when people’s number one artist was somehow, inexplicably, Morgan Wallen.
Lead images: Spotify and X
The post How Did Spotify Wrapped Work Out My Listening Age & Why Do I Feel So Old? appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
