A Look at Spotify Wrapped 2020

By Justin Kang

One thing Spotify users hold over Apple Music users is “Wrapped”, a personalized experience that provides insights on your music over the year. Typically released sometime in early December, Spotify Wrapped has become an annual event for members of the internet to compare each other’s tastes in music, and throw themselves back to songs they loved earlier in the year. If you are looking to access your Spotify Wrapped results, it is important to remember that it is exclusive to the mobile Spotify app and not accessible on a computer.

This year, the Spotify team was evidently busy, as they released a plethora of new features to improve the listener’s experience. See below a list of updates to Spotify Wrapped:

New Badges

Listeners will be awarded with newly titled badges depending on the way you listened to music this year.

Personalized playlists

Spotify will create custom playlists ranging from “Your Top Songs” to “Missed Hits” and “On Record”.

Story of Your 2020

You will dive into a personalized journey through your year in music all in Story format.

On top of the “favorite song” diagnostic, Spotify releases the data for your top 5 most listened artists, songs, and genres. When users share their results with their followers, it always igntes discussion. Twitter rap outlet “DJ Akademiks”, which goes by the handle @Akademiks, has been sharing with followers exclusive insights on artists this year. As per Spotify, the top 5 most streamed artists this year were Juice WRLD, Drake, Lil Uzi Vert, Post Malone, and Taylor Swift.

A notable statistic Spotify has provided for users this year is your ranking in comparison with other fans of your top artist. For example, if you dedicated thousands of minutes to listening to a specific artist in 2020, Wrapped would show that you were in the “Top 0.5%” of his/her listeners this year. This feature has given a lot of excitement to the music listening community, and as a result, “Top 0.5%” became the #1 trending tag on Twitter the night Wrapped was released. Being the generous company that Spotify is, they even offered a feature this year for non-Spotify users to view insights on this year’s music and artists. It is safe to say that Wrapped is an experience to look forward to every year, and the day it releases is a difficult day to avoid people talking about it. Every social media network is flooded with discussion regarding how one’s music taste changed through the year. In some cases, some listeners are embarrassed by the songs they played the most earlier in 2020. “Your Top Songs” is a genius move by Spotify, as it invites users to revisit their most listened to songs of the year. It is a fan favorite, and I have personally heard people talking about the satisfaction of rediscovering songs they forgot about. Spotify for Artists was released shortly after, and posed interesting results for this game-changing year in music. (See below for statistics):

Most Streamed Artists Globally