Spotify Wrapped does not always seem accurate

By admin On Dec 2, 2020

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Have you already viewed or listened to your Spotify Wrapped list of 2020? It may very well be that you do not fully recognize yourself in it. This is why.

Spotify Wrapped

You can of course have listened to a certain artist or track a lot, but there are many factors that determine whether it is actually counted as listened to. Consider, for example, offline listening. Perhaps you have been abroad this year or you have listened a lot while on the road to save your data. Now it is sometimes said that the offline listening minutes are actually tracked and are only sent again when the phone is back online, but there are also many people who claim that this is not the case.

When is a song actually labeled as “listened to”? That’s if you’ve been listening to a song for more than 30 seconds. So you can skip a bit at the end if the chorus is repeated too often, or listen to a song again: as long as you listen for 30 seconds again.

November doesn’t count

If you listened to the new album of artist X a lot in November, then you probably won’t see anything of it in your Spotify Wrapped. Wrapped is not entirely about the year, it is about the year up to and including October. At least that’s true of what you’ve been listening to a lot. However, the top artist list is quite different, even looking at previous years.

Don’t forget that this year you were probably more at home, but also gave more parties at home. If a friend of yours takes over, there may just be a song in your Spotify Wrapped that you have never listened to – and in bad cases you may never want to listen again -. Also realize whether you are using your account alone at all. For example, if your loved one / child / mother uses Google Assistant at your home to play all kinds of music, then your profile will of course be affected.

Collaborating artists on Spotify

Collaborations between artists have also been booming in recent years. The artist who is named first gets the so-called stream count, so it is counted as being ‘listened to’. The rest of the artists who work on the song will therefore not be counted in your Wrapped 2020. In short, all those artists that Clean Bandit works with don’t see any of the stream counts. Are you a fan of Anne Marie and is your favorite song from her Rockabye with Clean Bandit? Then I hope for Anne Marie that you don’t listen too much, because she benefits much more from listening to songs of which she is the main artist.

This year it seems as if we have gained a million music genres. In my ‘genre hunger’ it says that this year I listened to 562 genres, of which 127 were new. I think if I have to name genres myself, I don’t get beyond fifty different ones. However, when I look at what I have listened to the most, these are pretty obvious genres: pop, rap, R&B, Alternative R&B and dancehall.

Genrebender

I wonder what all those other genres could be. Plus: when does something fall under a genre? I would class The Weeknd under RnB, but if I look at my most listened geners, it seems that a lot of ‘my’ RnB is really classified under pop by Spotify. In my view, that only makes it even weirder that there are so many genres.

On the other hand, Spotify has to do something: making the Wrapped lists a bit crazy only ensures that you will share it more on social media. It is already one of the biggest advertisements for Spotify every year: after all, everyone is going to share their results on Instagram, especially because Wrapped is really used as a kind of stories. It is also very nice to find out what you have listened to, although you should always keep in mind that there are many factors that determine what is labeled as ‘listened to’.