Usually, I wouldn’t say I like math, but when you combine it with music, I’ll pay more attention. Spotify Wrapped comes out at the end of every year, giving us an idea of what we have listened to and for how long. Here’s how Spotify Wrapped does its calculations.
Spotify Wrapped Is a Snapshot of Your Year’s Listening
Over the last decade, Spotify free and premium users have been looking forward to Wrapped as a year-end treat. What started as a page on the Spotify website got baked into the app in 2019. We’ve been enjoying its insights ever since. It gives us an overview of how many hours we listened and what we listened to. But a lot of math is happening in the background to come up with those listening numbers.
When you get your Spotify Wrapped share page, you’ll notice a big number for the number of hours listened to, as well as listen counts for all of your favorite artists. The app collects all of your listening preferences, including the number of songs you listened to the most for the year, but what counts as a “listen?”
The Math Behind Your Spotify Wrapped
According to Spotify, a “listen” only counts if you listen to the song for at least thirty seconds. That means, even if you only listen to the operatic part in Bohemian Rhapsody, it’ll count that song as part of your streams and add that to what you’ve heard for the year. That way, it won’t automatically skew your listening preferences to what the algorithm thinks you should listen to.
When Does Spotify Wrapped Stop Tracking?
In the past, Spotify Wrapped only counted your listening between January 1st and October 31st, meaning that all your November and December listening was left out in the cold. Recently, Spotify updated their Wrapped statistics to calculate November, meaning December is the only one left out of the roundup. However, listening to your most-listened-to songs during December might pad the numbers slightly more. To encourage this, Spotify handily gives you a “Your Top Songs for 2024” list.
What About Offline Listening?
Premium listeners have the option to make some lists available offline. What happens to the things you listen to while offline or downloaded to listen when you’re not connected? Spotify logs those listens, and when next you connect, it updates your listening numbers. Even if you’re listening to Spotify offline while traveling, the Wrapped count considers those listens.
Do Private Listening Sessions Count?
Private listening sessions also count towards your total listened hours, but songs from those sessions don’t make it into the final Wrapped countdown. If you listen to something in a private session, Wrapped assumes you don’t want it added to the total listens for the year. It’s a handy way around having your guilty pleasures show up in your Wrapped.
Podcasts Count, Too
What if you use Spotify for podcasts? Since they’re not songs, they won’t show up in your Wrapped image either, but they will count towards your total minutes listened. Spotify Wrapped gives a top-five for artists and songs, so podcasts are sadly excluded from the count.
This year, Wrapped also offered us something new. In your Wrapped, there’s a page for exploring your music evolution. This feature shows how the music you’re listening to at the end of the year differs from what you listened to at the start of last year. For some of us, it could be eye-opening how wildly different those two tastes could be.
Spotify’s Collecting Your Data, but Not Being Creepy About It
Like most apps these days, Spotify collects your data, and it’s useful for little things like Wrapped. Among the data Spotify collects to make Wrapped possible includes:
- A record of what you listen to and for how long
- What times of the day you listen, and what you listen to during those times
- What you skip, put on repeat, and the genres you most listen to
This, again, ignores things you do while in private sessions. However, the data it collects allows it to build a pretty good idea of what type of listener you are.
The data you give Spotify is used to match you with better music. It works on the premise of collaborative listening. In its simplest form, this means that if you listen to the same artist as someone else, you may like other artists or songs that they do.
Spotify also uses audio modeling to figure out what types of things the music you listen to the most demonstrates. It then combines this with your listening habits to develop curated lists. Those “For You” auto-generated lists get better the more you listen to and like. If you’re interested in what Spotify’s insights about you are, you can check out your Spotify stats yourself.
Does Wrapped Just Give You a List of What the Algorithm Suggests?
Now that you understand how Wrapped calculates statistics and what data Spotify collects, it might seem that your Wrapped is just a collection of things the algorithm suggests you listen to. In some sense, this is true. If your listening is limited to the discovery playlists or a few auto-generated ones, then your only agency is what you skip.
If you’re like thousands of Spotify users and only have a single “Liked Songs” playlist, even listening to this gives Spotify more information about what you like and allows your Wrapped list to be more customized to what you actually listen to. Overall, the more personalized playlists you have, the less dependent you are on the algorithm to build your listening history.
A Cute Feature That Shows Off Spotify’s Algorithm
Spotify is a mainstay for many people’s listening. Whether you’re a free or a premium listener, Wrapped gives you a good idea of what you listened to and when during the year. For those who want more of an idea of their listening history, services like Recieptify offer a deeper look at what you listened to with accurate listen counts based on Spotify’s collected data.
If you’re like me and are intrigued by music and your listening history, Spotify Wrapped is a great chance to see how your listening taste has changed over a single year or years. 2024 is almost over, and I’m already looking forward to how much my listening taste will change in 2025!
