It’s that time of year again. No, not the festive season - but Spotify Wrapped season. With over a quarter of Spotify users being under 25, it isn’t surprising that the annual summary of your listening habits has become something of a phenomenon among young people. At St Michael’s Catholic Grammar School in Finchley, this has never been more obvious with the celebration of ‘Spotify Wrapped Day’.

 

The real thrill of Spotify Wrapped is its unpredictability. With the date changing each year, you’ll only know when you’ll receive the evidence of your musical guilty pleasures with a notification or a friend’s message reading ‘It’s here’. You’ll then be told exactly what you listened to, for how long, and the option to share this with the world (if you’re confident enough, of course). St Michael’s has a high population of Spotify users, so the evening and day following its release became an event in itself. 

 

The following day in the school was filled with "How was your Spotify Wrapped?" and it became a way to bond with people you previously hardly knew. Personally, I feel a deeper connection with the girl who admitted to ‘Low’ by Flo Rida being one of their top songs of the year and her brother’s third most listened to genre being ‘Sea Shanty’. 

 

I asked some students their thoughts on how Spotify Wrapped has become a bonding experience for the school and everyone agreed on a shared sense of embarrassment: “You never want to share how much anime music you listened to in a year, but then you also get to find out that someone else is in the top 0.005% of Beyonce listeners so really you both cringe together. Friendships are strengthened," said Muna. 

 

Áine agreed, adding that “There’s a lot of new students who’ve joined this year who I don’t know, and I think having something like this really helps the school community more than any other event. You can talk to people and find people with similar taste and immediately you have a connection,”

 

With the yearly event being easily shared on social media, the opportunities for students to connect over shared tastes are endless. I’ve reached out to people over a shared love of a singer, which really shows how popular Spotify Wrapped is amongst young people in a community. It remained a talking point days after its initial release and stays as a running joke for easy conversation with both old and new friends. With Christmas and friend discounts becoming available this season, the growth of this phenomenon is almost inevitable and shows why Spotify has stayed as one of the most consistently popular apps for young people across the years, and in particular for students at St Michael’s who have created their own community based around their listening habits. Now as the initial shock of our own music taste has sunk in, expect to see students playing their shameful favourites at full volume before the new year hits and data tracking starts once again. Until the new musical year, happy listening!


Listen to your Spotify Wrapped here: https://www.spotify.com/us/wrapped/