Spotify Wrapped: Data Collection Wrapped in Consumption Perversion

@doomscroll_forever on Instagram

Having access to nearly every piece of published music at any given time is a serious consumer luxury. It is fairly well known however that the largest of these platforms that provide such luxury are doing so without paying artists fairly. The worst offender, and platform of the largest user base, of course being Spotify. This is largely why we have seen public call outs for boycotting/switching off Spotify for more "ethical" alternatives such as Tidal.

Discourse around consumer boycotts aside (this topic seriously does not interest me); it's worth questioning how Spotify has survived the many years of public pressure, not just unscathed, but doing better than ever before. Do people not care about musicians? Maybe. But in the era of stan culture, infinite sub-genre-fication, and kids selling "low monthly listeners screenshots", I kind of doubt it.

As someone who only switched off of Spotify in January this year, I think Spotify Wrapped is what's keeping users and bringing more on the platform. Personally I think Spotify Wrapped alone kept me for probably my last two years with them, which I am embarrassed to admit. I used last.fm to track my listening before Wrapped was even a thing, so maybe I deserve some grace?

Year-in-Review and Beyond Artist Payouts

Now let's get into more of Wrapped specifically and why this sucks, beyond the surface level of recognizing Spotify pays artists like shit. This year I saw tons of different "Year-In-Review" iterations from various tech companies come out. Strava, Doordash, Duolingo, ChatGPT, Discord, all of these are just ones to name off the top of my head.

The transparency of showing users just how much data collection is being done on them is disarming in nature. Nothing is wrong about us collecting your data, it's only just to provide you with fun facts and personal insights! But this is where things get metaphysical. Capitalism is always looking for new frontiers to conquer, it's intrinsic to its imperial nature. The new frontier isn't our relationship with companies or their products anymore, but instead our relationship with the act of consumption itself. And if they can convince us to identify with our consumption, then it becomes our relationship with ourselves. They are manufacturing consent.

@mike_sunday on Instagram

I see it taking root already. I see what I believe to be symptoms in the current youth culture. Measured evidence of this? I don't know. Though as I was born in 2002 I will speak on intuition and pose some examples.

Instagram has reposts, boldly displays the likes of users that you follow, and shows off on users' profiles who follows that account. People have shallowly given this the name of "gamification", which I think misses the point. Gamification assumes users interact with apps through some level of abstraction, which I believe to be true, but what's happening is more intimate than that. Once you know your year will be summarized, your behavior stops being neutral. Wrapped turns ordinary usage into anticipatory performance. People start behaving for the recap. The metric has become the story, and the metric no longer measures genuine performance but instead measures optimization.

On streaming platforms, listening to certain artists more frequently for social recognition at the end of the year is the clearest current effect. But I've caught myself doing similar shit on Instagram; liking or not liking posts because the thought appears in my head that others will see, following and unfollowing accounts on the same basis. The Duolingo streak works the same way: people (including myself years ago) do piss easy quick lessons just to maintain their streak, completely separate from the assumed goal of language learning.

I see this beyond myself. Many others are doing the same shit, I've seen many admit to it. I've socially experienced people bringing up in conversation "x person liked y post" and "x celebrity unfollowed y celebrity". People should not know these things about others. The social impacts should be looked at; this likely partially explains some part of the destruction social media has done to how humans relate to one another. That's not the point here though, maybe a topic for another day. This tangent is just to show how the effects here are pervasive and may be rippling out.

Now let's bring this back to how people are relating to themselves. People are increasingly identifying with their consumption and what they consume.

Take the old Stanley cup craze from a while back. Imagine how different that situation would've been if Target released a year-in-review made with all the customer purchasing data they 100% already have. Some people were already competing with one another to get as many Stanleys as possible just for attention off of social media posts. If seeing a "You were in the top x.xx% of y product purchasers" at the end of the year was normalized prior to that event, I am totally certain that the Stanley cup craze would've been way more potent. Artificial scarcity and the resale game compounding the drive for consumption.

Speaking of resale, another crazy example of this is people selling screenshots of various artists on Spotify displaying them at low listener counts. It's a flex, proof of early adoption, cultural foresight turned into tradeable clout. There's a connection here to betting markets and speculative behavior. A couple years ago I saw this influencer cryptocurrency thing, something like the "Joeyy coin", obviously done for the musician Joeyy but the company putting it out was doing it for many more artists as well. It is basically a way for early fans to buy an asset and bet on the future success of the artist, profiting from the appreciation of their stake. People are going "niche for niche", betting on artists going up in Spotify listeners, monetizing their consumption. Attention becomes an asset and information a currency.

So not only are the forces of capitalism trying to find new frontiers, gaining capital from every possible interaction, nor are they only looking to predict and manipulate our consumption with their massive amounts of data, they are trying to make us fall in love with it all. Posting a wrapped essentially asks your circle to "update your perception of me accordingly". Once people compare, herd effects begin to follow. People converge on artists, restaurants, habits, if knowing it makes them look good on the annual scoreboard. A function of software to nudge users into sheep behavior without ever issuing instructions.

@doomscroll_forever on Instagram

On Artists, Platforms, and Where I Stand

Despite saying I am not interested in this topic, it's relevant to my position on streaming services, so while we are here I will throw my hat in the ring. I find myself hesitant to entirely agree with the narrative around artist payouts on streaming services. Yes it is crazy to have access to such a catalogue of music for so little, that I understand. However, promoting consumer guilt because of this I think is stupid and honestly a little bit entitled coming from artists. I will be bitter and say honestly that musicians are spoiled now, things are pretty good how I see it and it's really funny to just default to assuming that the previous system would afford the vast majority of you the opportunity to do what you do. Honestly ask yourself, are you producing anything interesting enough for people to buy copies of at full price? Odds are no, especially if you have to compete with the huge catalog of classics. I'd much rather own Neil Young's Harvest than some unknown artist's EP that's kinda just okay.

In comparison to the legacy model for the music industry, I hardly doubt people were actually spending more on music back then. Dedicated music fans surely contributed more than ~$12 a month buying copies via iTunes or physical media, but radio and VHS/MTV served music broadly to the general population essentially for free. Royalties were of course a thing but that still rides on the gatekeepers of the music industry and whether or not they give you time on air. So it's still relatively the same problem experienced on streaming services by smaller artists; the difference here of course is access.

Fans and artists are in direct contact now, and the reach is vast. I listen to artists across the globe, outside the US/UK dominance of the past. The effects of this are clear. Since the industry transformed from Napster/Limewire into streaming services, major labels have lost their grip of the industry. Smaller labels and independent artists are able to sustain themselves now. I'm a fan of music, I go to shows all the time, and honestly anytime an artist I like comes to my city, I'm almost always there. I'm not a huge merch person but I participate on occasion, but I still see merch sales are going crazy. It's all to say artists are making money. They're still being screwed, sure, but the current system offers such greater opportunity to artists.

I see it as such; we are working from a much better place than before. The current problems we need to address for the music industry are far easier to address than the ones from before. I of course think cutting out the tech overlords is the way to go. Major labels got kicked to the curb prior, but musicians answer to streaming services now, their new daddy. I don't have a concrete solution in mind yet for how best to do this, but I will do what I think best to move in that direction. I do wholly believe in the value of the internet for music.

My decision to leave Spotify wasn't only about streaming economics. It was political. The No Music for Genocide movement resonated with me when I saw so many of my favorite artists start pulling their music. Spotify investments tied to AI drone technology used in warfare shows that they have no morals. YouTube continuing to run advertising relationships with Israel while a genocide is ongoing tells me where their allegiance is. They both collect and sell our data, while perverting our interactions with music. These companies clearly only care about one thing, money, and at some point you have to draw a line.

@doomscroll_forever on Instagram

How I am Refusing

This is in part where my blog comes in. This project is explicitly anti big tech and anti social media. That doesn't mean anti technology or anti internet. I'm both a socialist and a software engineer. I believe the internet and machine learning could be the most liberatory tools ever created when removed from the profit incentive and need for infinite growth. I also think the dominant narrative around tech is poison, blame is poorly guided, platforms are treated as inevitable, real solutions are rarely discussed, and surveillance is accepted as fun convenience.

I don't accept that.

This blog is an attempt to share differently. I want to write about whatever I'm into. Slower. More deliberately. I'll talk about music because I actually like it, not because an algorithm decided it should be surfaced. I'm a comp sci student, so I'll defend software from lazy people with no real systems knowledge making luddite-adjacent critiques; I really don't like people's shitty critiques of AI when they couldn't even define it. And because I live in this world as a young adult, one day to inherit all of its problems, I will contemplate about society and where it is going.

I am currently working towards getting off streaming services. I got off of Spotify January 2025, switched to YouTube Music, and I am now switching to Soundcloud Go+. My plan is to continue building my collection of music slowly by buying downloads direct from artists or via Bandcamp, while riding out paid Soundcloud as my daily driver, and occasionally using the unpaid version YouTube Music on an ad-blocked browser. Piracy is also never off the table for any of the pieces of shit that make good music. Thom Yorke I am looking at you.

Pay what you want programs I deeply respect. Some music I value enough to pay full price for easily, others you would be lucky to get a couple bucks out of me, so I just say they should take it, it's better than the $0.01 you may be able to earn from me off of my streaming plays. The mix of monetization forms is what I think is important. Pay per stream to even out royalty distribution alongside pay what you want to cut out the middle men and promote real media ownership again. This is what I think the next, and more just, evolution of this system will look like.

Final Thoughts and Going Forward

Wrapped works because the incentives work well for Spotify and disastrously for everyone else. For Spotify the music industry is a growth machine. Users listen more, replay more, behave more predictably, and generate free advertising every December. It's a zero marginal cost loyalty program and a free global ad campaign at the same time. It turns time spent into sunk psychological cost, so quitting the platform now seems like erasing a personal archive.

For ordinary society the same mechanism turns ordinary behavior into a performative act. The recap defines what is legible and people naturally steer towards what will be legible. Economically though, this creates the perfect user: high engagement, low chance to churn, and easy to model.

So instead of posting a Wrapped, I did my own version. I wrote about the artists, albums, and songs that actually mattered to me in 2025. Not ranked. Not scored. Not optimized. Just what stood out, and why.

What I'm doing now is admittedly a bootlegged version of what I consider to be the next evolution of music distribution. Piecing together paid streaming where it's least harmful, direct purchases where possible, ad-blocked access where necessary. It's messy and imperfect, but it's a step toward a system where artists control more, platforms control less, and listeners own what matters to them. I'm fumbling toward something better even if I can't build it alone. I invite anyone reading to feel free and do the same, let the shit go, don't become dependent on these apps, and share with intention; not advertisement infographics.

I don't want my year summarized by a corporation. I don't want my inner life rendered into slides. I don't want to behave today for the sake of an infographic tomorrow.

This isn't about purity. It's about refusal. About choosing, in small ways, not to let everything be conquered, measured, and sold back to me.

drowning in distortion