It’s getting to that time of year again, the decorations are up, the temperature is dropping and you’re luxuriating in eating an advent calendar chocolate first thing in the morning. That’s right, it’s SPOTIFY WRAPPED TIME! The most wonderful time of the year. A time to revel in your top tunes, question why you had to listen to Taylor Swift’s Folklore quite so much whilst gracefully crying over a glass of red and feeling confused about why you have so many running playlists, but have never actually managed to go on a run?!
At ThisThat we’ve analysed the responses from some zesty millenials on how they felt about their Spotify wrapped. We present to you, data on some data all wrapped up in a neat bow. There’s a lot of politics around it; are you proud of your results? Embarrassed? Did you share the results to your Instagram story to let your following know you have good taste, or maybe that you’re unashamed of your trashy taste? The people want to KNOW. The people being us (hi, hello there).
Here were some of our best findings:
A fierce 2% of people have dumped their partner over music and 8% have ditched a friend.
Taste is a subjective thing, but sometimes it really does matter especially when you’re dating someone. Sharing music with people can be a pretty intimate affair, like saying, “this is a small piece of my soul in musical form, what do you think of it?”. It can be pretty crushing if someone you’re seeing or a friend of yours just “doesn’t get it”, or walks out of the room halfway through a playing of your favourite song from childhood, or that new artist that you’re obsessed with. Someone being a dictator of taste for their friendship circle was certainly less common, but perhaps something to keep in mind the next time you’re picking a new BFF.
When asked if people thought their taste in music was accurate 80% of participants did.
If we filter these results by those that shared their results on Instagram, surprisingly people who felt their results were inaccurate were more likely to post their Spotify wrapped online. In fact, when we filter those who saw the results as inaccurate, we learned that there was little correlation between happiness in the findings and sharing on Instagram (lower purple bar 60:40 relationship).
In contrast, there was a much stronger correlation with happiness and seeing the results as accurate in order to post (upper purple bar 90:10 relationship). Music taste reflects your identity, what you value, whether you like more mainstream pop music or old soul, what you think is “cool” more often than not too. It’s unsurprising then, that those who enjoyed feeling that their Spotify music history reflected an accurate version of who they are as a person decided to share it.
We decided to dig a little deeper and find out why people had decided not to share their results. The main reason given was embarrassment (77%), closely followed by people considering it a basic thing to do (75%). You’ve got to wonder whether those who felt it was a basic thing to do, may also have been embarrassed by their results….?
In conclusion…
Overall, we had a whopping 83% response rate and 1.1k opinions giving a pretty accurate reflection of the general population. Music taste proves as divisive as ever, with a small percentage dumping a partner or friend over differing taste. So, maybe reconsider before sharing a headphone with a new lover then, it could be the last thing you do ( meant in a non murder mystery kinda way). Those who shared their Spotify results on socials were more likely to think it was an inaccurate representation of their musical preferences, yet the tastemakers gained joy in sharing accurate representations, and plenty of people think that sharing your results to stories (an effortless and pretty genius marketing ploy by Spotify) is poor social media etiquette and “basic”. And so there we wrap up, unwrapping our survey on Spotify wrapped. :)