According to Spotify Wrapped and its very scientific, very foolproof, very reliable set of formulas and mathematics (mathematics?!?), I am 37 years old. I am, in fact, 25. Spotify tells me that it has calculated my “listening age” (is this what we’re calling it now?) based on the fact that I am “into music from the Early 2000s.” I think I just played the Shrek soundtrack one too many times on repeat, but alas, this was enough to skew Spotify’s algorithm.
Spotify Wrapped day has just come to pass, resulting in swarms of Spotify users taking to Instagram, Facebook, and X to tell the whole world about their Top Artists and Songs of the year. It is a joyous occasion, yes, especially if you’ve managed to wrangle some of the cooler albums into your Top Five (and not, say, the soundtracks to Wicked and Wicked: For Good, for all you musical theater nerds out there). However, the app has introduced a new piece of information to share on socials: your listening age, which reveals how old you really are based on the songs of the era you listen to the most.
While Spotify seems to have predicted some users’ listening ages more or less accurately, others have been deemed much older. The oldest listening age I’ve seen so far on the Internet has been 100, for users who enjoy tracks from the late ‘30s.
Spotify has released the rationale for its different Wrapped statistics, which includes an explanation of the logic behind our listening ages. “Your Listening Age is based on the idea of a ‘reminiscence bump, which is the tendency to feel most connected to the music from your younger years.” I suppose this sounds legitimate.
Spotify goes on to describe how it looks at the release dates of all the songs you’ve played this year, identifies the “five-year span of music” that you engage with more than other listeners of your age, and then labels that span as your “reminiscence bump,” or the time when all the favorite songs of your formative years cropped up.
“For example, if you listen to way more music from the late 1970s than others your age, we playfully hypothesize that your “listening” age is 63 today,” Spotify explained in their statement. “The age of someone who would have been in their formative years in the late 1970s.”
I’m not sure how I feel about Spotify “playfully hypothesizing” on my musical tastes, but it has made for another Instagram story to either share (or hide, in shame) before the year comes to an end.
