The launch of Spotify Wrapped is a day of joy and celebration for music fans. All over the world, they’re gathering online – with big smiles and open arms – to share parts of themselves with friends and family. “Look,” they say with pride, embarrassment, or a mixture of both, “that’s what I listened to this year.
“Here is the soundtrack to my life.”
Unfortunately I cannot share this moment. I can’t be part of this parade. I need to switch to goblin mode. I must withdraw, into my private pit, with slumped shoulders and bowed head. In the last five years, maybe longer, my Spotify Wrapped has become an abomination — an obscenity unfit for human eyes and ears.
The problem: I am a parent of two young children under the age of 10. I am a leper. Spotify Wrapped is dead to me. Send me your thoughts and prayers.
For me – and parents around the world – Spotify Wrapped is a day of mourning.
It’s hard for non-parents to understand the loss, but I’ll try to explain. When Spotify Wrapped first launched in 2016, I opened the app eagerly and excitedly. What was my top song? Who was my most listened to artist? Back when I happily created tightly moderated playlists of the cutting-edge pop music I listened to, it might have been Maggie Rogers, Carly Rae Jensen, Låpsley, Tegan and Sara.
No longer. Now it’s a wasteland…
In 2022, my Spotify Wrapped is evidence of a life torn apart by the sticky hands of chaos gremlins intent on tearing my algorithms to pieces. There’s no wet leg, there’s the Moana soundtrack. There is no Rosalia, there is this song from the end of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. There are no Alvvays, there are… [checks notes] Bad lip reading?
Yes that’s right. For some reason, my 9-year-old son, who was obsessed with memes and internet culture that he consumed second-hand via the playground, became obsessed with a Star Wars parody song, My Stick Is Better Than Bacon, which is releasing back in 2020 became.
It was my most listened song of 2022.
I consider myself lucky. A few years ago one of my top tracks of the year was a song called Poop Poop Poop Poop Song by The Toilet Bowl Cleaners. A song with insightful lyrics like “Poop, poop, poop, poop, it does not drops from my poo, it look not be delicious to me, but flys say yum, yum, yum.”
In a house like mine, with Alexa speakers in multiple rooms, it’s all too easy for my kids to blurt out a song name and have it playing in seconds. That’s the source of all my problems.
Case in point: this year my 6-year-old son became obsessed with something called Poppy Playtime, a bizarre horror survival game for kids that there was no way I would allow him to play. Armed with third-hand knowledge from older kids at school, he discovered a series of bizarre metal songs about the characters from the game – dubbed Huggy Wuggy and Kissy Missy. He endlessly tormented my smart speakers with those awful tracks.
Every day I’m in hell.
I recognize that there are solutions to this problem. A second Spotify account connected to the smart speakers? Sure, that would work. Spotify’s family plan, which allows multiple different accounts on the same plan, would probably be the most effective patch. But the reality is… I’m a parent. I am tired. My day starts with a frantic rush to school and ends with me slumped on the couch and watching half an episode of 1899 before falling asleep. The last thing on my mind at this point is “repair Spotify”. I survive. That’s enough.
This reminds me of my very favorite Spotify story. A friend of mine, a new mom who is out of sleep and out of ways to get her newborn baby to sleep. Your most played song on Spotify:
Strong hair dryer (reassuring).
A classic of the white noise genre, we can all agree on that.