It’s Spotify Wrapped season! Every year millions of people look forward to the day their favourite streaming service presents them with a summary of all of the music they listened to throughout the year. Since its launch in 2016, Spotify’s Wrapped feature has been a way for music fans to share who they listened to and what their favourite songs were. Aside from being a really clever marketing campaign for the company, Wrapped is an interactive way for people to connect over the music they love, and It quickly became an internet culture phenomenon that continues to be a yearly period that is celebrated through instagram posts and memes.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Earlier this year, I looked into the relationship between ones music taste and their personality traits, which lead me to find that there is a strong correlation between how a person presents to the world and the music that they listen to. Wearing music taste as a badge of social identification is an extremely effective way for people to quickly and easily relate to one another and to bond. It turns out, your music taste massively reflects who you are as a person, so much so that you can learn more about a stranger by listening to their favourite songs than by having a 10 minute conversation with them (don’t ask me where I discovered this, I couldn’t find the source… but trust me). Spotify themselves conducted a study looking into how music listening habits and patterns can accurately identify a person’s Big Five personality trait.

As someone who meticulously analyses their own listening habits, I don’t get all that excited for my end year summary – Apple Music Replay – apart from one aspect: finding out how many albums I managed to listen to (888 so far this year, by the way). But it’s about for more than the statistics. It’s about displaying in a succinct and easy way who you were in a year. And that is revolutionary to me. So even though I’m personally not a Spotify user, I love Spotify wrapped season, mostly because for one day of the year, I’m not one of a select few who’s posting about the music their listening to.

For anyone who’s curios, here is my wrapped line up:

Top Artists

1. Tyler, the Creator

2. Jordan Rakei

3. Kendrick Lamar

4. Vince Staples

5. Sampha

Top Songs

1. it’s not litter if you bin it by Niko B

2. Running Late by KARRAHBOOO

3. KIDS by Internet Girl, 4TUNAT & Godly the Ruler

4. Suspended by Sampha

5. Freedom by Jordan Rakei