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It has given some in middle age dubious hope that they have their finger on the cultural pulse. Meanwhile, some younger users have been told their listening habits suggest they are well into retirement.
Spotify has confected a wave of intrigue over what our musical preferences suggest about our vintage, with its “your listening age” feature causing delight and consternation.
The gimmick is a new addition to the streaming service’s annual Wrapped feature, which uses the swaths of listening data it collects to deliver personalised insights into a user’s year in sound.
Many users found they had jumped generations in their musical habits. Some gen Zers noted they had been given an age in the 70s, while parents presumed their children’s determination to listen to the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack on loop had dragged down their supposed listening maturity.
The artist Grimes posted a listening age of 92, which she put down to her “love of the oldies”.
Mark Morgan, 37, a principal ecologist, was admirably relaxed at being allocated a listening age of 72. He surmised that the figure had been pushed up by him listening to Long Long Time by Linda Ronstadt, released in 1970.
“I was neither happy nor annoyed by it but it maybe makes you feel a little less cool,” he said. “But I was listening to Long Long Time because it featured on [the US drama] The Last of Us.”
John Howes, 67, from Malvern, Worcestershire, said his musical age came through as 17 thanks to listening to new music for his local music sharing group.
In a generational reversal, Jon Porter, 60, a logistics consultant from Berkshire, was given a listening age of 21 – the Irish singer CMAT featured in his streaming habits this year – while his daughter Bethan, 21, was given a listening age of 59.
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The data science behind the feature is predictably thin. Spotify says it is based on a “reminiscence bump”, or a tendency to listen to music from one’s formative years. The feature examines a user’s listening history, compares it with others of a similar generation and then “playfully hypothesises” a listening age.
The real aim, which has proved successful, is to find new ways of encouraging users to share their Spotify findings.
“Spotify Wrapped is the most successful marketing tactic of the last 10 years,” said Troy Osinoff, a digital marketing entrepreneur. “[It is] built on one simple idea: people are obsessed with themselves.”
Taylor Swift was the most streamed artist on Spotify in the UK for the third year running, followed by Drake, Sabrina Carpenter and The Weeknd. The most streamed song was Alex Warren’s Ordinary.
The annual Wrapped campaign has become a marketing boon for Spotify. However, a rival Unwrapped campaign aims to highlight the platform’s hosting of AI-generated music and willingness to run ads from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is tasked with finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.
ICE’s role in implementing Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda has led to protests and arrests. Spotify has previously said the ICE ads were “part of a broad campaign the US government is running across television, streaming and online channels”. It has said the ads do not violate its policies but that users can give them a thumbs up or down to manage their preferences. It is not the only major platform to feature the ads.
