December is here, we’re almost at 2025! I gotta say, this year has been pretty great for me personally. I can genuinely say this year has probably been the best so far in my adulthood. I’ve been able to travel to the US and meet some of my internet pals, I ditched my 2012 Macbook for a fancy GAMER laptop and generally speaking, I’m beginning to have a deeper understanding of who I am and what I want out of life. Now all of this positivity is leading up to one big turning point – this past month has been the fucking worst. I lost my car, I’m unemployed – but worst of all, I have to deal with seeing everyone post their Spotify wrapped!

Okay, obviously I’m exaggerating. I do find the ‘Spotify Wrapped’ an interesting and novel concept that allows music listeners to reflect on how their taste has developed and evolved over the years. It’s a nice way to streamline your musical taste and share it with others, which makes it 10x easier to begin conversations with people. Spotify is also making a nice effort to reward hardcore fans by congratulating them and showing them how attentive they’ve been towards their favorite artists. This is all good. I am all for this. The problem, which you probably are already aware of, is how it’s warped some of the more ‘chronically-online’ into being even more circle-jerky and self-congratulatory.

NO ONE CARES THAT YOU’RE IN THE TOP 0.0000001% MICRO-FANBASE OF NOSGOV.

Please read the sentence above slowly and digest it. Does it not resonate with you? Change ‘Nosgov’ to your favorite artist. Still not resonate? Good – that means you’re normal… Or retarded.

My definitive issue, which honestly goes further than Spotify wrapped, is how the online consumer is leveraging their media consumption for social gratification. There is no need to put yourself on a pedestal or pat yourself on the back because you willingly listened to the same artist an unhealthy amount of times. If you want a better example of this, look at Last.fm – what started out as a revolutionary way for music listeners to share, discuss and keep track of all the different types of music they consume, it’s more or less derailed into a bragging contest of “look at this artist I listen to, you don’t know who they are, na-na-na-na..”

The joke wrote itself when I noticed that people are unironically botting their plays. Yes. I wish I was lying. People are actually using bots to inflate the amount of times they listen to a song so that they can achieve bragging rights. Dude. What in the actual fuck. I kid you not, I saw someone post their Spotify wrapped on their Instagram story: ‘436,228 minutes listened’. That equates to about 9.9 months. So the crossroads there is that you’re either telling the truth and you need to be sectioned, or you’re lying – and you should still be sectioned. There is no damn reason for you to have your stats that inflated. You reach a certain limit where your favorite artist will no longer see it as heartwarming and genuine, but rather creepy and distasteful. Please think about that.

So for the average person, I really have no genuine issue with you and your Spotify Wrapped. Obviously, you should take into account that, most likely, none of your 20 story viewers are going to care. However, I don’t want to stop you from having your fun or potentially networking with fellow fans within your desired niche. My problem is the bastards on #musictwt who have so little to live for that their life achievements are that of digital high-scores and online leaderboards. Bleugh!

So what are your thoughts? Who was in your top 5 this year? Comment down below!