Spotify Wrapped is a enjoyable annual roundup of your listening habits. Yearly, the music streaming app provides new options, like again in 2023, when it assigned individuals a Sound Town, which means a metropolis that supposedly matched their listening fashion. The Spotify Wrapped for 2025 simply landed on Wednesday, and new options this yr embody a multiplayer recreation known as Wrapped Get together and an in-your-face evaluation of your listening age.
That final one blew my thoughts just a little. My precise age is 57. In keeping with Spotify, my listening age is 79.
SEVENTY-NINE.
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President Donald Trump and former Presidents Invoice Clinton and George W. Bush are 79. Liza Minnelli is 79. Cher — properly, she’s ageless, however technically, she’s 79.
Look, I am no teenybopper, I get it. I am a proud Atari Wave Gen Xer. So it isn’t like I used to be 18 and was then informed I used to be listening to AARP tunes. However does Spotify understand the way it sounds to be hit with a listening age that is 22 years older than I actually am?
What’s my age once more?
Lawrence Welk is about my pace, in line with Spotify. Be aware large GERITOL advert within the background.
I am not the one one Spotify is getting older up. My 18-year-old daughter was informed she was 37, perhaps due to her love of Nineties emo. Some individuals get aged down — my colleague Corinne Reichert’s 73-year-old mother was labeled 21. (“She listens to a number of Ok-pop,” her daughter says.)
Spotify pegged my colleague Jon Skillings as an octogenarian, with a listening age of 86, “because you had been into music from the late ’50s.” Blame that on his ardour for jazz and a wholesome dose of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in his sonic excursions. A minimum of Spotify had the great style to play Depend Basie’s 1957 model of April in Paris when it delivered the information.
“I will not lie. That 86 did sting just a little,” Skillings says. “I actually thought I used to be mixing in much more tunes from this century.”
For the file, Spotify did flag a 2024 launch from the modern jazz pianist Vijay Iyer as his prime album. “See?” he says. “I can sustain with the instances.”
However Skillings appears like a spring rooster subsequent to CNET’s Ty Pendlebury, who wrote our principal Spotify Wrapped article and revealed that Spotify bluntly informed him he was 100.
I could also be outdated, however I received to see all of the cool bands
Prince within the Nineteen Eighties, once I noticed him stay for the primary time.
I do know 79 is not outdated to many individuals. I misplaced my sister Claudia final December at 78, and her ghost will hang-out me endlessly if I get snippy about an age she by no means even received the possibility to complain about. However there’s one thing jolting about seeing an age that is 22 years older than you might be, particularly regarding music, the place the business is all the time using on the again of some sizzling new younger singer.
Do I actually care? Possibly I should not. There is a T-shirt that claims one thing like, “I could also be outdated, however I received to see all of the cool bands.” It is most likely made for Child Boomers, however as an Xer who noticed Prince stay in his hometown of Minneapolis in his greatest decade, the Nineteen Eighties, I proudly establish with that comment.
I’ve seen some folks in live performance, yeah, cannot deny it. A few years in the past, I noticed Steely Dan at an outside amphitheater close to Seattle. (No static in any respect.) I noticed people legend Pete Seeger carry out with Arlo Guthrie on the College of Minnesota one yr. My mother, born within the Nineteen Twenties, and my brother, a 1944-born child, had been with me, and we had been all rapt. There have been children bouncing on their mother and father’ laps at that present. Pete and Arlo’s music knew no age. And as an Nineteen Eighties concert-goer, I’ve seen bands like The Pet Store Boys, REM, U2, Redd Kross, The Church, and the Pixies.
However as mother of a teenage daughter, I’ve additionally been flooded with extra trendy music, and I adore it, too. Due to her, I’ve seen Panic! on the Disco, Alex G, Automotive Seat Headrest, Melanie Martinez and Slaughter Seashore, Canine. And my daughter is not straightforward to categorize, both. She’s in an emo groove today, listening to music from earlier than she was born, and noticed My Chemical Romance kick off their Lengthy Reside The Black Parade tour, the place they carried out their 2006 album The Black Parade in its entirety.
How does Spotify decide your listening age?
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Full Unknown. After I noticed the film, I began listening to a number of Sixties Dylan music on Spotify, which can be why Spotify thinks I am 79.
Spotify claims my listening age is 79, not as a result of I sit round watching Lawrence Welk Present reruns, however as a result of I “was into music from the early ’60s.”
I feel my Spotify musical age has loads to do with me watching the current Bob Dylan biopic A Full Unknown and abruptly deciding Spotify was the right option to atone for Dylan’s music. I used to be just a bit too early for his heyday, though I lived simply off the well-known Freeway 61, the place God stated to Abraham, kill me a son. OK, so I noticed the film, and I mainlined me some Dylan on Spotify.
So why not hand me a decade as an alternative of an age? I used to be born within the ’60s, so dubbing me a ’60s child can be simply tremendous by me. (My start yr is 6-7, which ought to be a well-liked yr with Gen Z and Alpha.) I grew into my musical tastes in Minneapolis within the Nineteen Eighties, with Prince, The Replacements, Husker Du and The Suburbs, so name me an ’80s little one and I’ll put that sucker on a T-shirt and flaunt it.
I’ve determined I will put on my Spotify age proudly. No one ought to be shoved right into a musical pigeonhole; there are nice tunes from each decade, in the event you’re open sufficient to hear, and an 80-year-old can take heed to whoever they select. I am proud that my musical tastes aren’t narrowly outlined by my start yr, however as an alternative, are open and huge.
So you may excuse me if I have a look at Spotify calling me 79 and quote an iconic music from these Gen X gurus, Nirvana:
Oh properly, no matter, by no means thoughts.
