Spotify Wrapped Has Created a Year-End Menace

To my enduring shock and horror, my Steam account announced that it had been taking notes on all of my gaming sessions in 2022. It presented this information to me in the form of something called “Steam Replay”—an obvious remix of the millennial cultural pillar Spotify Wrapped, which details all of our listening habits in a pithy, algorithmic slideshow. It turns out that formula is truly interdisciplinary, because I learned that I spent the bulk of my time in front of my computer playing FromSoftware's opus Elden Ring and not much else.

Like Spotify Wrapped, Steam Replay attempts to show off the program's constant, furtive surveillance; demonstrating, in haunting detail, the unflinching reality that the way we spend our days all add up into the way we spend our lives. Maybe other people enjoy the year-end audit of all of their tastes and proclivities, but personally, I closed out of the tab in an instant and vowed to never venture into the data again. The end of the year is supposed to be filled with luxurious bacchanals and quiet time with friends and loved ones, but lately—with all of these Wrapped clones—it’s starting to feel like an attempted intervention.

Spitgate! Sexts! The Funniest Celebrity Scandals of 2022

Spotify Wrapped already haunts me like a ghost. Since its creation in 2015, I have logged several years where Drake—yes, Drake—has emerged as my top artist, which is a fact I’d never want to tell my kids, girlfriend, parents, or friends. I know why it happens like this. I’ll be on the treadmill in the middle of August, listening to the same playlist I always do when I’m working out, considering the horrible ramifications that will become clear on New Year’s Eve. It is once again revealed that instead of, say, trawling through new music or challenging myself with confrontational, uncharted art, I have shaved another 12 months off my lifespan mostly listening to “I’m On One”—a permanent reminder that my music taste will be spiritually locked into the confines of college.

Steam’s Replay has a similar effect, as it reminds me of all the many, many games I have not played in favor of yet another dispiriting round of Warzone with the boys. (Cracking open the recap to see that, like, NBA 2K23 is one of my most-played games makes me feel like a total fraud. I could’ve been playing Pentiment, the game about monks solving a murder!)

And don’t even get me started on Reddit’s “Recap” feature, which, in a sacrilegious violation of posters’ plausible deniability. The platform announces the forums you spent the most amount of time in over the course of a seasonal cycle, in a way that will always make you feel bad inside. Does anyone really want to be covering their eyes, clicking through the data, hoping against hope that an NSFW subreddit didn’t hit their top five? It’s like waiting for the results of a crucial blood test.

I could go on. Sony released a year-end recap for PlayStation users, which is pretty bold because I’m pretty sure 2022 contained exactly two PlayStation games of note. (Perhaps this is why Xbox hasn’t enacted a similar feature, because Microsoft somehow had an even worse year than Sony.) Jimmy John’s—you know, the deli chain —has broken ground on its own version, in flagrant defiance of God’s light. Do you want to know how many sandwiches you've eaten over the course of a year? I sure as hell don’t! Careem, a Dubai-based food delivery app, does something similar when it enlightens its customers on the verboten contours of their appetite. ("Your 2022 in a bite? Chicken.")

I imagine this will only get worse as more tech companies catch on. Elon Musk’s Twitter will absolutely unveil metrics demonstrating how many thirst traps or clapbacks we’ve posted in a year, and ideally, Google is keeping tabs on unanswered emails. Honestly, if we could get official numbers on the average length of time some people take to respond to the unread messages in their inbox, then maybe all is forgiven.

I am probably uniquely susceptible to the frailties of the Wrapped system, in the sense that I have spent the entirety of my life defining myself by the quality of whatever media I am consuming, rather than any intangible qualities of my character. In the mid-2000s, there was this short-lived social media platform called Last.FM that was designed to match users by their music taste. (Ed. note: Last.FM is still alive, and this insecure music-nerd editor still obsessively uses it every day!) It would automatically sync up to your iTunes and keep a record of every song you played. So, if you were a misguided high school student like me, you’d routinely leave albums playing on repeat as you slept in order to ensure beyond question that you reigned supreme in your Yeah Yeah Yeahs fandom.

The Best Songs of 2022, From Beyoncé to Bad Bunny

This was clearly pointless, but it cut to one of the core tensions between taste and tech. When we’re online, we can’t help but leverage our favorite bands as a currency. Last.FM, Spotify Wrapped, the mix CD you made some girl in math class is less of an authentic replication of your soul, and more like a report card proving that you did your homework. "That’s right, Big Thief hit number three for me this year."

I'm a lot older and wiser than I was in those days; all of that hipster insecurity has been slowly drained from my body. And yet, the Wrapped boom teleports me back into a much more unsteady realm—a place where I am constantly wondering if I am watching, playing, or listening to the right things. It is a yearly ritual of self-loathing when Drake bubbles to the top. There is a reason I unhooked my Facebook profile from my Spotify account long ago; nobody, not even me, wants to know that I’ve been queuing up a lot of 3OH!3 lately. Let the surveillance end, let the judgment rest, and please, let me be lame in peace.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.