For some, Black Friday ushers within the vacation season. But for others, it’s once they open Spotify on a late autumn day and see that their Spotify Wrapped is obtainable. It’s the opening salvo of year-in-review content material—and maybe essentially the most private, bringing with it the chance to relive summer season hits or cringe on the cumulative minutes spent listening to a tragic music after a breakup. 

This yr’s shock Wrapped drop got here on Wednesday. And, as they’ve for the previous a number of years, Wrapped screenshots flooded Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. 

It’s a social development that rises annually and cuts by way of the noise, fueled by delight or self-deprecating humor, relying who your prime artists turned out to be. And it’s all constructed on consumer knowledge, which Spotify packages in cool neon colours with cheeky commentary—a transfer that takes the sting off the creepiness of realizing Spotify is all the time listening. And in return for entertaining its customers for the day, Spotify will get its annual probability to drive a social media development and reap the advantages of free promoting as hundreds of thousands share their Wrapped publicly. 

As extra firms come beneath hearth for monitoring customers and storing knowledge, Spotify manages to largely keep away from such widespread criticism. Instead, many anticipate and welcome Wrapped’s arrival. But it’s additionally a properly packaged manifestation of the music streamer’s potential to seize each second folks spent listening from January to October.  

“This is a particularly shining example of the fact that Spotify’s business model is based on surveillance,” says Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future. “Spotify has done an amazing job of marketing surveillance as fun and getting people to not only participate in their own surveillance, but celebrate it and share it and brag about it to the world.” 

Spotify launched its first model of a year-in-review in 2015. But it didn’t catch on till a number of vacation seasons later, as soon as the app started serving it up on pastel-colored playing cards. It has amped up its interactive insights, additional personalizing the expertise. In 2021, Spotify Wrapped was shared 60 million instances by customers. But that stat doesn’t seize screenshots, a standard manner folks put up their outcomes to social media. 

For 2022, Wrapped advanced to place every consumer into considered one of 16 listening personalities primarily based on the music they streamed and different classes, like how early they’re to find one thing or the age of the music they gravitate towards. Spotify additionally built-in Wrapped with WhatsApp and Roblox to unfold its attain even additional. “Wrapped is one of the most exciting times for Spotify users each year,” Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey mentioned in an electronic mail. “We have built something special that our audience anticipates and looks forward to.”

What makes Spotify so good at creating these lists and predicting the music that customers wish to hear is a sturdy synthetic intelligence system and its immense knowledge trove. It has additionally mined that knowledge for oddly private ads, selecting on customers’ particular person listening habits and anonymizing it earlier than plastering it on billboards. “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, What did you do?” an previous advert learn.