Arts Vanity: What Should Be On Your Next Spotify Wrapped

It’s that time of year again. Amidst 4 p.m. sunsets, chilly nights, and a mad rush toward the holidays, the powers that be at Spotify have finally dropped Spotify Wrapped, the year-end summary of listeners’ favorite songs, artists, and genres. Ignoring how much personal data streaming services collect on our musical preferences, Wrapped is a nice retrospective on the past year, and it’s cool to get a sense of others’ music tastes via social media. Maybe there’s a bit of judgement going on, too (“You listened for how many minutes!?!,” “Surely, no one can like Bright Eyes that much”), but Wrapped feels largely like a spectacle to enjoy and take in at every year’s end.

Although this summary tells us what music we listen to, it’s also interesting to consider how we listen to music. I’m not sure I want streaming services to collect even more data on personal listening habits, but it’d be cool to get a sense of how I enjoy music and how it compares to others’ routines. In this spirit, here are some metrics and features that aren’t on your Spotify Wrapped this year but could be interesting to know.

Most Consecutive Repeats of a Song

When a song gets stuck in my head, it’s really lodged in there. For weeks, I’ll almost exclusively listen to that song until I viscerally loathe it. Then, I likely won’t play it for a few months. Most recently, I’ve been stuck on the Talking Heads classic “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” One day in November, I listened to the track twelve times in a row before realizing that other music does in fact exist. I’m curious as to where I fall on the earworm distribution: Do most listeners line up their repeats back-to-back, or do they intersperse them amidst other songs?

Your Top Song Pairings

Some songs are just meant to be played together. For some pairings — such as the closing medley of “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry The Weight,” and “The End” from The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” — there are well-established artistic and historical rationales behind these sequences. Other groupings happen for more personal reasons, maybe as a result of similarities in imagery, theme, or sound palette. For example, I tend to listen to Phoebe Bridgers’s “Garden Song” and then Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” since they both remind me of growing up in Los Angeles. Other pairings feel more inexplicable and happen more subconsciously, such as Taylor Swift’s “Betty” followed by Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” and it’d be interesting to identify patterns in how we choose to sequence our music.

Where You Decide to Skip Songs

When listening to new music, the decision to skip is a weighty one. Committing to listening to the entire song could be the introduction to an exciting artist or genre of music, or it could be three minutes better spent listening to a tried-and-true favorite. Some songs feel skippable within the first ten seconds. There’s something about the instrumentals or tempo that immediately suggests that it’s not for me. Other tracks take longer to reach the decision to skip. Maybe the chorus isn’t catchy, or the guitar solo just goes on and on.

Skips can be important even when listening to familiar favorites, as we seek to cut straight to the good parts. I love the first verse of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” but can’t sit through the bridge (sorry, Paul). As a result, I tend to skip the track as soon as the bridge begins. With music, all we have to offer is our listening attention, which is heavily mediated by how we choose to skip songs.

A Music-Related Media Recommendation

Lately, the musician biopic seems to be Hollywood’s pet project. Coming up, we have the highly anticipated “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. In recent years, we’ve also seen films about the lives and careers of Freddie Mercury, Aretha Franklin, and Elvis. And if movies aren’t your thing, there’s plenty of other music-related media being produced in the form of journalism, podcasts, and even merch. These can be meaningful ways to learn more about the music and artists you love, and who better to give you recs than the app that knows all your music listening habits? Based on my Spotify Wrapped, a Phoebe Bridgers skeleton onesie or the Bob Dylan autobiography “Chronicles” would be ideal recommendations.

—Outgoing Social Media Executive Andrew K. Choe is currently figuring out how to prevent his 2025 Spotify Wrapped Top 5 from featuring Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, and Alex G for the third year in a row. He can be reached at andrew.choe@thecrimson.com.