Why I opted out of this year's Spotify Wrapped

By Maggie Zhou

As I grow increasingly frustrated and fatigued by Big Tech, I find myself trying to loosen its leash, writes Maggie Zhou.

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In years past, I’d eagerly await the communal, cultural tradition of unwrapping Spotify Wrapped. Seeing my personal listening habits distilled into digestible, shareable statistics made me feel seen. I welcomed Spotify telling me I was a pop Pilates princess, or whatever. I wore my placement in my favourite artists’ top 0.1% of fans as a badge of honour. I drew pride in my listening minutes, a number I tried to beat annually.

But this year, I decided to opt out of it. As I grow increasingly frustrated and fatigued by Big Tech, I find myself trying to loosen its leash on me, a self-confessed internet tragic. AI’s sinister race to the bottom has only fast-tracked my misgivings. I’m afraid of what we’re giving up when we hand over our creativity, time and decision-making.

What are we left with?

Growing up on a steady diet of online personality quizzes and magazine horoscope sections, I understand the innate desire to seek out hyper-specific information about ourselves. It’s nice to feel understood, to see yourself reflected back on a screen.

I’m scared, however, about how we’ve come to believe that tech knows us better than we know ourselves. Camera rolls have replaced memory-keeping, rings tell us how good a night of sleep we’ve had, apps tell us if we’ve had enough water, algorithms tell us what we’ll next want to buy, watch or listen to.

There’s a growing attachment to hyper-personalised metrics, but I question who this data mining actually serves. Is it normal to know – and crave – such detailed information about ourselves? The jolt of satisfaction we receive from seeing ourselves in neat graphs and numbers surely doesn’t come close to the triumph of tech juggernauts, whose pockets are lined with our collected and sold data.

Like a frog slowly being boiled alive, we embraced tech so wholly into our lives that we don’t know where it starts, and we begin. We’ve become accustomed to algorithms dictating our tastes, likes and dislikes. We yield to its all-seeing eye, rather than tapping into our intuition or critical thinking skills. It’s easier – much easier – to outsource this labour. But why should we? Increasingly, refuting tech’s convenience has felt like a muscle I must train.

When tech’s sole motive is to keep you hooked on its platforms, it feeds you an endless stream of monotonous content it predicts will keep your eyes glued to the screen. We are the subway surfers, bound to riding train tracks, infinito.

“The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works. This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material,” writes tech culture journalist Kyle Chakya in his book Filterworld. “Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.”

Spotify is no longer the cutesy Swedish start-up it was when it launched in 2008. Once a revolutionary, ‘for the people’ antidote to piracy, it’s now a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. From abysmal artist payouts to Joe Rogan’s estimated $US250 ($AU378) million podcast deal, rage against this machine has steadily grown.

Plus, earlier this year Spotify allowed recruitment ads for ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to run, and donated A$227,000 to the Trump inauguration ceremony.

Spotify has been a constant companion, scoring many of our lives’ big moments. Joint playlists, podcast plays and complications of a year’s listening habits document first kisses, first heartbreaks, new friendships and new places. Spotify plays through earbuds and speakers, travels through Instagram Story uploads and shared links to friends, accompanied with, “I think you’d like this” sweet messages.

Defecting from a platform that feels so interwoven with our lives and identities seems futile. Hell, I’m listening to my “tender fragile Thursday morning” daylist as I write this. But there are various streaming alternatives cropping up – like Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal and Resonate – and a revival of owned, physical media, like CDs, vinyls and cassettes.

Though I am a user of Spotify’s recommended songs feature, I know that my favourite music recommendations come from the real world. I love hearing new tunes played on Triple J, receiving word-of-mouth suggestions from a friend, or discussing music with ride-share drivers.

This year, I won’t know what my most-played song was, or what ‘listening age’ I supposedly am. But I’m taking comfort in the fact that I know what my own stand-out albums and songs of the year were – the ones that felt like a punch to the heart, and the ones that compel me to belt along to their bridges. Tech doesn’t know why I find myself re-listening to certain verses or what memory a song jogs. Spotify’s 9:16 graphics can’t come close to understanding what I know about myself. Good riddance to that.

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About the author

Maggie Zhou

Maggie Zhou is a Melbourne writer, fashion editor, slow fashion advocate and the co-host of the Culture Club podcast. She’s written for publications like The Guardian, Dazed, The Big Issue, The Age, ABC, Harper’s Bazaar and Refinery29.