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 folks a Sound City, which means a metropolis that supposedly matched their listening type. The Spotify Wrapped for 2025 simply landed on Wednesday, and new options this 12 months embrace a multiplayer recreation referred to as Wrapped Occasion and an in-your-face evaluation of your listening age.
That final one blew my thoughts a little bit. My precise age is 57. In accordance 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 — effectively, 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 is not 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, based on Spotify. Notice big 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 folks get aged down — my colleague Corinne Reichert’s 73-year-old mother was labeled 21. (“She listens to quite a lot of Okay-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. At the very least Spotify had the nice style to play Rely Basie’s 1957 model of April in Paris when it delivered the information.
“I will not lie. That 86 did sting a little bit,” Skillings says. “I actually thought I used to be mixing in much more tunes from this century.”
For the document, Spotify did flag a 2024 launch from the up to date jazz pianist Vijay Iyer as his prime album. “See?” he says. “I can sustain with the occasions.”
However Skillings seems to be like a spring hen subsequent to CNET’s Ty Pendlebury, who wrote our major 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I could also be outdated, however I received to see all of the cool bands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 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 without end if I get snippy about an age she by no means even received the prospect to complain about. However there’s one thing jolting about seeing an age that is 22 years older than you might be, particularly referring to music, the place the trade is all the time driving on the again of some scorching 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 finest decade, the 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 folks legend Pete Seeger carry out with Arlo Guthrie on the College of Minnesota one 12 months. My mother, born within the 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 dad and mom’ laps at that present. Pete and Arlo’s music knew no age. And as an 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 fashionable music, and I like it, too. Because of her, I’ve seen Panic! on the Disco, Alex G, Automotive Seat Headrest, Melanie Martinez and Slaughter Seaside, Canine. And my daughter is not straightforward to categorize, both. She’s in an emo groove lately, listening to music from earlier than she was born, and noticed My Chemical Romance kick off their Lengthy Stay 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 quite a lot 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 believe my Spotify musical age has quite a bit to do with me watching the current Bob Dylan biopic A Full Unknown and immediately deciding Spotify was the right solution to make amends 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 12 months is 6-7, which needs to be a well-liked 12 months with Gen Z and Alpha.) I grew into my musical tastes in Minneapolis within the Eighties, with Prince, The Replacements, Husker Du and The Suburbs, so name me an ’80s youngster 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 person needs to be shoved right into a musical pigeonhole; there are nice tunes from each decade, when you’re open sufficient to hear, and an 80-year-old can hearken to whoever they select. I am proud that my musical tastes aren’t narrowly outlined by my start 12 months, however as an alternative, are open and huge.
So you may excuse me if I take a look at Spotify calling me 79 and quote an iconic tune from these Gen X gurus, Nirvana:
Oh effectively, no matter, by no means thoughts.