How Spotify Wrapped its hands around the music industry, and us
Posted December 8, 2023 9:39 am.
Last Updated December 8, 2023 9:44 am.
Most of you probably at least glanced at it. And many of you were excited and eager to share your Spotify Wrapped details with your friends and followers. After all, isn’t that the whole point? To show off your musical taste, connect with others who share it and provide free marketing for a streaming behemoth?
Kelsey McKinney is a reporter and writer at Defector and the host of Normal Gossip. “The thing that is, I think, scary about the Spotify Wrapped is that it is so beautiful and it’s so easy to share that it is easy to forget that this is a company that artists themselves are saying — and have been saying for almost a decade now — is destroying their careers,” said McKinney.
Spotify’s Wrapped is the biggest and most popular of algorithmically created personal year-end lists, but it isn’t alone. Why do these things always suck us in? How has Spotify managed to convince us to pay them, instead of the artists we love directly? And if Spotify is getting all our money, why isn’t it turning much of a profit?
