The Spotify Wrapped Effect: The Complexities of Innocuous Surveillance
‘Tis the season: Hot Chocolate, Mariah Carey, and Surveillance Capitalism.
For many, the post-Thanksgiving period marks the start of the holiday season, and represents a sense of comfort and warmth. For college students across the country, the holiday season marks the onslaught of all-nighters and caffeine to finish studying for all our finals. But for an ever-growing population of tech-savvy youth, the start of December marks the release of Spotify’s annual “Spotify Wrapped.”
For those unfamiliar, Wrapped is an annual tradition where the company divulges a user’s data to them in a slideshow format, including information about their minutes listening, top artists, top songs, top genres, and more. This is the standard, but every year offers a variation, with this year boasting “Wrapped Mapped” and “Me in 2023”.
The event is, at the end of the day, a Marketing Campaign by the company, one which the CEO describes as a “FOMO Effect”1. When looked exclusively as an advertisement, it has been applauded as a stroke of genius by marketing experts and business outlets alike. Indeed, the crafted FOMO effect is quite effective; this reflection of one’s listening habits functions as an extension of the self, of our tastes, and our emotional, cultural, and social identities. By opting out of this annual tradition, you are denying yourself the opportunity to share your individuality and personality with your social sphere.
This marketing strategy is so effective in how it blurs the obvious in so many ways: it redefines our identifying role by turning us, the consumers, into free advertisers — and in that process obscuring the blatant consumption of our data by reflecting it back to us in a fun, colorful presentation.
Surveillance Capitalism with a Friendly Face
Unlike many companies, Spotify does not attempt to hide the sheer amount of data that is collected under the guise of “personalization.” Rather, the express purpose of Wrapped is to show off your data to you, through an innocuous yet straightforward manner. This phenomenon can be compared to surveillance capitalism, a concept developed by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff in her works spanning decades of research into this phenomenon. The primary thought revolves around corporate commodification of personal experience (“data”), as Zuboff offers a definition of how “surveillance capitalism audaciously lays claim to private experience for translation into fungible commodities that are rapidly swept up into the exhilarating life of the market”2.
This comparison does not end with big tech companies like Facebook and Google, however. In an interview with Wired, digital rights advocacy group Fight for Future’s director Evan Greer makes an indirect comparison of this concept to Spotify: “Spotify has done an amazing job of marketing surveillance as fun and getting people to not only participate in their own surveillance, but celebrate it and share it and brag about it to the world”3.
Surveillance capitalism does not solely attempt to record our behavior, but takes an interest in predicting and even modifying it. Particularly, Zuboff has gone on record outlining what surveillance capitalism means for human autonomy, and has described this age as a “direct intervention into free will,” and “an assault on human autonomy”4. We can clearly see a similar trend with Spotify’s data collection, as the amount of data they collect can tell such intimate, personal details of an individual’s life.
One of the common memes about Wrapped is that users will cite their mental spirals or depressive periods as to why their Wrapped is so “bad”. While these sentiments are mostly confined to jokes, it remains worrying how Spotify’s data can build such a large profile on a person, including more obvious ones like age demographic, perceived gender, ethnicity, location — but additionally, subjective facets of a human personality like periods of emotional upheaval (remember how much Mitski you listened to after your last breakup in May?) sexuality (see Alexander Avila’s video “How Spotify Manufactures Gay Culture” for more),5 and even sexual practices itself (Yes — they have metrics used to recommend playlists to you, even ones explicitly for sex).
This comparison is not necessarily to say that Spotify’s business model itself is intentionally sadistic; after all, it is at worst another symptom of capitalism, meant solely as a marketing strategy that exists to extract revenue. However, it does generate a worrying sort of familiarity to the concept of surveillance capitalism as a whole. With a company making such a blatant show of the collection of our data — data specifically relating to our affect, tastes, and personality — our role as the listener becomes commodified, and we become familiarized with this process to the point where we take it for granted. In Zuboff’s words, “privacy is no longer a social norm”4. We may be dubious of companies like Google and Facebook tracking our data, but Spotify habituates surveillance capitalism to us with a friendly face.
The Social Media-fication of Music
In another way, the Spotify Wrapped tradition posits a slightly worrying shift in the way we listen to music: though music has long been a social ritual, the datafied nature of Wrapped transforms a generally community-oriented practice of sharing and discussing music into an easily-digestible slew of content. With the ‘evidence’ fully on display, there is a pressure of both being the most cultured fan of a specific artist, genre, or subculture, as there is a pressure to appear “cool” at all given moments. We cease to be “listeners,” and instead become “consumers”.
Moreover, the effect of Wrapped points to the way that even the most personal connection to art and music has been touched by this new era of social media. In her essay “The ‘I’ in the Internet,” New York based writer Jia Tolentino delves into the evolution of the internet into this “unlivable hell” we know today. One of her crucial points compares today’s internet to the works of sociologist Erving Goffman, comparing his idea of the performed self from his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to the way regular people perform on the internet. She marks a clear, more cynical difference in the Internet today, stating:
“On-line, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the off-line audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave” 6
Of course, Spotify does include an attempt at a “backstage” area, accessible via its “Private Listening” mode. I have personally been guilty of utilizing this feature when listening to some more “embarrassing” music choices that I did not want my peers with cooler taste to judge me for. However, the point still applies: Wrapped changes the way we interact with music as a whole, by turning it into a medium akin to social media that perpetuates performance. If the datafication of our personalities shows how we shift from “listeners” to “consumers,” this sociological aspect of Wrapped denotes an extra step, making us into “performers” as well.
Solution?
There is no true “solution” to any of these problems. At the end of the day, Spotify Wrapped is fun. We like Spotify Wrapped because it tells us what we are; it validates our personhood, and is a mirror-image that reflects our personalities back to us. And this is part of the problem as well — in the process of celebrating our personalities, we are discouraged from being complex individuals, and are instead reduced to data. It is important to refocus on self-determination of our own tastes, personalities, and appreciation for art.
And moreover, it is important to be critical of Wrapped, even if we engage with it in a positive way. This is one of the core tenets of media literacy — to interact with technology, including Wrapped, in the most positive way, we must be conscious of the potential pitfalls — and this can absolutely happen just as we share our top songs to our Instagram stories.
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References
2https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1095796018819461#body-ref-fn2-1095796018819461
3https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-wrapped-user-data/
