Spotify Unwrapped, the personal stats on how people who listen to stuff with a particular program did that, was all the rage on my social media when it came out the other day. (So early! There's still one-twelfth of the year left! I'm sure it gets earlier every year eh.)
Mine didn't work. I was very amused. Mine is just a few screens worth of plain colors that crashes the whole app every time I try to look at it. I said "I can only assume my year in music is too powerful for anyone to know about," but a friend said they had the same rsdilt because they'd turned off animations on Android. No doubt I've done the the same (I don't remember that being an option, but it's going to be one of the things I do
immediately, thus I forget it's even possible for the world to be otherwise). Nice to know they've made it inaccessible as well as all the other reasons my social media came up with to declare it Problematic (which mostly have to do with surveillance capitalism and how terrible Spotify is at paying artists whose music you stream, etc.).
One of my friends who doesn't use Spotify and really hated hearing about this so much said, "part of the issue is that by releasing stats about your spotify usage is that it reasserts that spotify *is* music. By saying that you listen to x artist x amount of time that is (hopefully obviously) only on spotify and doesn't take into account when you listen to them on vinyl, on the radio, other services, etc etc. But people love numbers and so those stats kind of become canonical. In a way it's not unlike how some people think of facebook as the internet, which is not an accident."
It's an interesting I didn't want to tell him he's wrong but I was really surprised by that, maybe because it's not how I think of Spotify at all.
I only listened to Spotify for like 3,000 minutes this year or something. Which makes sense: Spotify is minor for me. Most of my listening comes from BBC 6music (especially my beloved RadMac, and Cerys), Radio 1 and CDs in the car (New Model Army, Billie Eilish, Marina from "the Diamonds"...I can't remember what else) and
the virtual DJ night we tune into almost every Thursday (and random other times -- last week they celebrated having done 100 shows since the pandemic started!).
Spotify is music for a use: ambient is always my biggest genre because I put on random playlists of it when I'm doing reading or writing work (and also playlists
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hafnia curates this year, as an anxiety-management thing). I played an 80s playlist while I was painting the front room and the shed and pulling weeds at
haggis's house this summer, so it thinks "Sledgehammer" is a big song from my year even though I don't like it
at all. It thinks random ambient tracks I don't have clear memories of ever hearing before are among my most-played songs too. The relatively-few minutes listening make for these weird, meaningless superlatives so I don't put too much stock in them.
At the same time, looking at my "top songs" of the year, I notice with a pang of sadness that it doesn't have any of one thing that featured prominently in my "top songs of 2021": songs both Andrew and I like that we listened to together. Lots of R.E.M. and stuff.
The top songs playlist is interesting. As well as the random 80s songs and the random ambient tracks, there's a song I got from the Doof ("Goose Goose Revolution"). There's some Eurovision stuff (I loved "Je Me Caase," the Lizzoesque song from Malta, Efendi from Azerbaijan (though I prefer 2020's "Cleopatra" to 2021's "Mata Hari"), and especially Jeangu Macrooy who represented the Netherlands with the criminally underrated "Birth of a New Age" but it turns out I like other songs of his too. There's a couple of new albums from this year,
Montero and a new one from old favorite The Hold Steady. There's a Cosmo Sheldrake track that I discovered while Cosmo was still the name I was using! A year is a long time.
