Thoughts on Predictability, Risk, and Cultural Stasis

Spotify Wrapped 2025

It was in 2015 that Spotify users were first subjected to the digital summary of their year’s listening habits now known as Spotify Wrapped.

Since then, Spotify Wrapped has marketed itself into a semi-global cultural event, dissected in the Op-ed section of the New York Times, advertised on the Paris metro, and endlessly re-posted on social media. This year, I even heard someone refer to the planned release date of Spotify Wrapped 2025 as ‘Wrapped day’.

Before I rip into why this quantification craze is – unsurprisingly – an instrument to capitalism and contributes to forge a risk-averse culture prone to platitude, I will say that Spotify Wrapped is quite the genius marketing technique. Indeed, with its animated graphic design, and personalizing rhetoric, Spotify has made the data tracking it uses to increase subscribers’ use (and increase company profit), into a fun cipher for our identities, like a BuzzFeed quiz on which Season you are. On Spotify’s website they state that “before [Wrapped], music listening was fleeting – songs played, favorites faded, and yearly soundtracks were forgotten. Wrapped changed that, turning data into nostalgia and listening into identity” - Spotify Wrapped: surveillance made sexy.

Ignoring the irony that the dematerialized process of streaming - which by design transmits small fractions of audio data from a server to our devices in real time – could somehow make listening to music less fleeting, the emphasis on nostalgia and identity is interesting here. Etymologically, nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). This impulse to long sentimentally for the past indeed derives from the painful reality that the present

will always be inherently unpredictable.

Humans have attempted to remedy the randomness and unpredictability of life - with stories, myths, religion, science - for about as long as we have existed. It seems as though this act of quantifying ourselves to oblivion, be it through Spotify Wrapped, Oura rings, or Fitbits, is our contemporary coping mechanism for the volatile nature of human identity and health. Quantification and data collecting is, after all, a method used to try and predict future patterns and outcomes. At the same time however, companies are profiting off of this human aversion to chaos by advertising data collection as a means to better understand yourself, and ultimately as a means to be in control (a fallacy that does allow corporations to manipulate consumer habits in order to increase their wealth).

A more acute desire for predictability and control makes sense when living through a time like ours, riddled with political havoc and against the backdrop of looming ecological collapse. Indeed, this need to grapple with the chaos of our present explains why media has become so nostalgic. Two good examples of this phenomenon are the plethora of Hollywood remakes released throughout the past decade, and the recent trend of re-watch podcasts devoted to analyzing popular shows from the last decade, episode by episode. Girls and New Girl are two shows that have become the subject of these re-watch podcasts.

Mainstream culture within a profit-driven capitalist landscape will always operate under the logic of finding the common denominator in order to increase the likelihoods of popularity and success. It seems then, that the current common denominator of culture is an appetite for predictability. Tech, streaming, and media companies are evidently doing what they can to capitalize on this thirst for the familiar.

Yet a culture (and its population) that is averse to risk is also one that is doomed for stasis. The familiar may be comfortable but it so easily becomes one-dimensional, and turns deeply uninteresting. Thought provoking and meaningful art is always one that challenges the status quo, and in turn challenges us. Above all, the sign of good art is one that resists quantification. So ignore your Spotify Wrapped, and let music, like everything else in the world, remain a fleeting phenomenon; I dare you to enjoy it.

Ksenija Carleton