It feels like it’s every week that I discover a new platform dedicated to analyzing Spotify users’ listening habits. From landscapes to receipts and to icebergs, these websites and apps get super creative by how they represent your recently listened-to tunes. We’re about a month away from Spotify users’ favorite holiday, aka Spotify Wrapped, which is the music service’s own way of summarizing your listening history for that year. Come that day in December, Instagram stories will be flooded with people showing off their tastes in music and extremely high streaming minutes. We’ve developed a need to categorize our music into niches and aesthetics, especially in the past few years, and these websites are a way for us to feel validated by the uniqueness of our tastes.
Starting off strong with one of the classic websites used to analyze Spotify habits: Stats for Spotify. This website doesn’t analyze your music tastes as much as it reveals what you’ve listened to the most in either the last four weeks, six months, or of all time. But statistics about your music have developed even further from Stats for Spotify. Recently, my friends and I downloaded the app Superfan, which allows you to join a group to compare music. Every Friday, Superfan releases the stats of your group, such as who listened to the most music, who was the most and least mainstream, and who had the saddest music, to name a few. It’s interesting to see what my friends have been listening to that week, especially because there is a feature where AI generates a sentence to summarize your “vibe” for the week.
One website that really feeds into our need for a unique music taste is Obscurify, which literally by the name tells you how obscure your music is compared to other users’. There’s some boost of ego we get when we realize we may be one of the first to discover an artist or just something in general. But with that appeal around having unique taste comes with a weird shame of falling into mainstream trends. I feel ashamed when I put on a mainstream artist like Taylor Swift, even if that’s the music I crave to hear. There’s even a strange feeling of liking your favorite artist less as they become more popular; as soon as everyone starts claiming your favorite artist, there is less of a draw. While all these apps and websites are just a fun way of portraying what you’ve been listening to, they do in a way make me feel like I have to fit into one category of listener. Sometimes I want to listen to so-called basic music, and I shouldn’t be scared of people judging my current tunes in the Friend Activity section of Spotify. I used to go on private mode when I was listening to songs I didn’t want people to know about – such as during my show tune phases – but I’ve slowly accepted that judgment over music tastes is such a strange thing to nick-pick about someone. Music tastes can reflect who you are, but they also don’t have to. Sometimes you just really want to listen to “Hamilton” and that’s ok.