This Spotify Wrapped season, don’t outsource your love of music to AI | music

I Like year-end list season. I love having the opportunity to reminisce and reflect on records that have stuck with me over the course of a year – especially when there’s an opportunity to recommend something others might have overlooked. I love searching through friends’ favorites for albums I’ve completely missed, and creating a huge listening queue. I love following critics who try to determine the year’s “best”, even when I end up screaming in a group chat about how wrong they are all. I like it because it requires looking back, racking your brain, and processing your year in listening. It requires thinking.

This year, with Spotify Wrapped taking over social media feeds once again, I’m struck by how the whole concept seems to dampen that critical practice into something more negative. It nudges listeners away from deep thought and toward accepting a company scorecard that reflects a very specific perspective on musical value. It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is certainly not always the case.

What do we lose when we entrust Spotify’s data-gathering and interpretation systems to do our end-of-year reflections for us? What thoughts and briefs don’t we write down and share when we hand this work over to tech companies that would rather automate our thinking? What playlist do you not create when you share the one Spotify has created for you?

As with other ways that convenience culture influences music — from personalized playlists to instant sound generation and beyond — it stands to reason that some fans would receive their findings, see the “share” button, and duly comply. But what is at stake is a sense of our musical memories, our personal archive of our years. When our thoughts and memories are not written down, they can simply be lost. When we accept that what a streaming service tells us about our music taste is true, it means there’s a lot more to us than we are no Remembering, learning or celebrating the music of our years and lives.

Spotify Wrapped now seems like just another example of something personal and precious being automated away from us; Another example of “offloading” the supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing in order to make life less stressful. It’s a particularly urgent consideration in 2025, a landmark year for consumers being sold on this kind of cognitive dumping via consumer-facing AI. It may seem as if every day there’s a new quick-monitoring product that claims to ease the daily burdens of reading, writing, researching, summarizing, or brainstorming—but this is work that helps shape how we think, how we make connections, and what we remember and what we forget. It can be uncomfortable at times and it may require friction, but friction is where connections are made, and working through that process is part of staying sharp, curious, and in relationship with the world around us. Without these points of friction, the decline of critical thinking continues.

There’s a lot to be said for how corporate decision-making shapes public memory when it comes to music—not just because marketing budgets often determine what becomes popular but because corporate strategy decides the very metrics that dictate what has value. But Wrapped doesn’t just use company metrics to communicate what’s important to the market, it uses the same logic to make claims about what’s important to us. You. It reinforces its own logic not only in taste but also in the individual’s sense of self.

And there are other reasons why the whole idea of ​​Wrapped is generally troubling — not just Wrapped but similar year-end recap campaigns that other streaming services have launched to imitate. These are basically meme-like advertising campaigns for companies that are notorious for paying musicians meager sums of money. They are only possible because of user monitoring practices. As for Spotify specifically, in a year in which the largest music streaming company has made headlines for its outgoing CEO’s investment in militaristic AI technology and subsequent artist boycotts, its deals with major brands to build generative AI products, and major changes in its leadership and operation of ICE recruitment ads, there will likely be a lot of concurrent commentary about the state of streaming — and the various reasons users will find to unsubscribe this year.

So what will we choose instead? This year, instead of letting your streaming service tell you which records were important to you just because you played them the most in one app, consider taking the time to write a list based on what you’ve already connected to. Share it if you’d like – even if it’s just a screenshot of the Notes app or a handwritten list that you photograph and share with a caption. Even if you just text or email some friends. Or if you prefer, write it in a notebook just for yourself and your archives.

I can already hear some of the defeatist responses this idea is likely to receive: “But people who spread their own rolls would never make their own lists anyway!” And I say: “Why not?” It may take some research but at least you can set the parameters yourself. I would suggest a list of records that you feel may have been overlooked, or a list of your favorite local releases. Or how about a list of the most exciting live shows you’ve seen, or the most surprising new music from the past? The possibilities are limitless. Corporations take too much: let’s not let them have this too.