Tell Me Your Spotify Wrapped and I’ll Tell You Mine

If you were one of the thousands of users who posted your Spotify Wrapped 2019 results on any social media platform at the end of the year, I salute you, and I’m definitely judging you. In a good way, though. The idea of music preferences being a tiny glimpse into people’s personalities is intriguing and not that unknown. For a couple of years, music personality quizzes from magazines or Buzzfeed have been questioning us on our music preferences to give us a result on our personality. As social human beings, it’s natural for us to be invested in getting to know ourselves or probably just fun to get a personality result and laugh at how accurate or not it is. With Spotify rising as a music platform, we’ve gotten a more accurate look at how our music data can tell us much more than just our Artist of the Year. Spotify has been recompiling an end-of-the-year round-up of your favorite music based on the songs that have been pumping in your ears through your daily commute, your solo-cooking parties, days when you felt like a bad bitch or laid in bed staring into the unknown. Music data results can be a great resource to dive into your self, your memories of the year, or as simple as being a great social media post. 

Spotify Wrapped is my favorite moment of the year for a variety of reasons. I get to take a ride down memory lane and listen to the songs that defined my year. It’s fun! As I’m listening to the specially curated playlist that Spotify has done based on my music data, I can clearly see the moments that defined my year through the songs that I’m listening to. Apparently, “Dejá-Vu” by Post Malone defined my Winter season, and I couldn’t agree more as I remember blasting that song on my car as I was carefully enjoying what seemed to be my last days of freedom before winter break. For my most listened song of the year, I got “Con Altura” by Rosalía and J Balvin which was the party anthem to my summer back home with all of my friends when no responsibilities were part of my day to day, and my only worry was to have a good time. Although I do have to admit that I was a little embarrassed when finding out that was the song that defined my year. I thought I was way more interesting than that. But hey, Big Data is watching us. This got me thinking. As I listen to these songs, I can’t help but realize how much I’ve changed throughout the year and how accurately and inevitably my music taste shows those changes and moments. 

So what does Bad Bunny being my artist of the year say about me? Based on music personality psychology, a real field actually, maybe I can dig up on that. There are two radically opposed views about music and personality: One is that song preferences are completely arbitrary and random, and the other is that our musical choices reflect important aspects of our personality. As you may have already guessed, I agree with the latter – then again, that can say a lot about my personality as well. How does this happen then? Music happens to fulfill three important psychological functions. According to a study published in Psychology Today, Scientific research has shown that people listen to music to:

1. Improve their performance on certain tasks to combat boredom and achieve optimal levels of attention while performing activities such as driving, studying, and working, 

2. Stimulate their intellectual curiosity by concentrating and analyzing what we listen to,

3. And, most importantly, to manipulate or influence our own emotional states to achieve a desired mood or state such as happiness, excitement, or sadness. 

Given that mood states happen to be closely related to our personality and understanding that people use music as a regulator for these moods, it’s not hard to see that an understanding of musical preferences should, therefore, provide the perfect window into a person’s darkest and brightest hours. Or what I would call a perfect understanding of a person’s soul. However, the issue with these findings happens to be that music genres are not classified based on emotions. They’re classified based on the description of the music, not people. Therefore, there’s a discussion that arises based on the music genres that people tend to listen to. Think about it, music has become so social that even our choices of listening to certain music genres are shaped by mostly, our social identity. You’ve heard or seen classic examples of this. Consider the different girl who brags about listening to intellectual music and defines it as listening to Frank Ocean, Lana del Rey, or jazz or whatever but is embarrassed to admit that she listens to mainstream music as well. And yes, that girl is me. And yes, Spotify Wrapped has made me accept it. Our needs to create personas play a role in our music preferences; thus, entailing music and social psychology are more related than most people want to believe. However, music and genres are more often blending together now and music taste is thus showing how specific and nuanced our personalities can be as well. This can be seen as further proof of why we think sharing our music taste is necessary. It can be seen as a way of opening up ourselves to our friends.

The real fun of Spotify Wrapped is that it has united us in sharing our embarrassments, proud moments, feel-good moments, sad-girl-hour moments, and many more through the magic of algorithms and ourselves. So, if you’ve posted your Spotify Wrapped 2019 results on social media, thank you. I’m gonna be spending the next couple of days analyzing you based on that.