Calla Braiker, Class III and Amelie Borges, Class III
Photo credits: Google Image
December marks not just the end of the year but the end of our year in music as we know it! Spotify Wrapped is the culmination of this; calculating a person’s listening habits over the past year. Minutes listened, favorite artists, songs, albums, and genres are topics people are eager to learn about themselves and others. It allows for a chance to share or brag about your listening habits. It's called “Spotify Wrapped," but for Apple Music listeners they have a Year in Review with the same statistics.
Music is incredibly important to high schoolers and listeners in general. Music can be used as a therapy that can be even more effective than medication or other forms of treatments. It helps with decreasing anxiety levels while providing a space to heal trauma. Music also allows for an emotional release that can have an influence on our well-being as a whole. Music additionally gives many people a voice and helps represent marginalized groups as well as connecting people from different backgrounds. Though, we're no strangers to the comfort and joy music can bring our school community.
Since Spotify’s founding in 2006, the music industry giant has grown significantly in popularity around the world. Spotify is the largest streaming platform right now, with a massive international audience of 600 million users. In 2015, it began showing listeners their habits over the past year - a condensed musical time capsule. Looking at global Spotify Wrapped stats gives us a clear view of listening trends around the world - trends that we can compare our own results against. Ranging everywhere from top artists to your most active day, Wrapped has many unique features that help you understand your year in music. This year, they added features like where around the world listens like you (your “sound town”), or what mythical creature matches your listening habits.
In late November this school year, around R2, we’re sure that you noticed a sudden excitement among your music-loving peers. This is, of course, all thanks to Spotify Wrapped. Our school community has music tastes as diverse as our student body, with listening habits varying across the board. In order to provide our readers with accurate info, we sent out a survey on each class’ Google Classroom about their Wrapped results. The results were certainly interesting. Class II represented half of our respondents, so we’ll cover them first. Based on the responses we received the top artist of Class ll was Taylor Swift, the top genre was Pop, the top sound town was Burlington, VT, the average amount of minutes listened to was around 55,420, and the top musical creature was a vampire. Next we’ll cover Class I who gave us the second largest response pool. For Class l the top artist was a five way tie between Of Montreal, NewJeans, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Rosalía. The top genre was K-Pop, the top sound towns were NYC and Berkley, CA , and the average amount of minutes listened to was around 45,291. Following Class I with the third largest amount of responses was Class IV. Their top artist was a three way tie between Ado, Bad Bunny, and Mitski. The top genre was Rap, the top sound town was a tie between Santiago, DR and Berkley, CA, the average amount of minutes listened to was 46,440, and the top musical creature was a tie between shapeshifter and vampire. The final class to be covered with the least amount of responses is Class III. The top artist was Måneskin, the top genre was Rock, the top sound town was Ithaca, NY, the average amount of minutes was around 85,000, and the top musical creature was time-traveler.
The day Wrapped comes out, people around the world explode in a frenzy of result-sharing and comparing - with their friends, their siblings, celebrities, anyone really. Right now, we’re providing you with a (slightly delayed) opportunity to look at our school’s habits versus those of the entire world. For example, Taylor Swift was predictably the top artist of 2023, with Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake, and Peso Pluma following close behind in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place respectively. The top genres, on the other hand, were Pop, EDM, Rap, Rock, and Urbano Latino. In terms of sound towns, four places tended to stand out more. San Luis Obispo, CA, Burlington, VT, Berkeley, CA, and Cambridge, MA took the cake as the four most popular locations for Spotify users. One of the most anticipated parts of the Spotify Wrapped is learning how many minutes of music you listened to in a year. However, the global average of minutes per year may shock you - coming in at a low 3695 minutes per year (a mere 2.6 days straight). Lastly, in terms of mythical creatures, there were 12 possible groups, groups that define your listening habits and personality over the past year.
Overall music is a very important resource for young people today. Music is a sphere that is often very important to teens and adolescents especially due to social media and the ability for a song to go viral. Music acts as a guide to many whether they make it or listen to it and it has been a constant in our existence for centuries. Music clearly leaves its mark on our own school. Many discipuli listened to more minutes than the global average of minutes listening to music. However that is where the differences end, our school has some similarities with global trends as pop music was one of the most common genres and Taylor Swift was the most popular artist. It was also clear back in December the excitement surrounding Spotify Wrapped as people shared and posted their results. It isn’t hard to tell that music is everywhere and is a lasting fixture in our lives.
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