Spotify Wrapped Is The Worst Day On Instagram

The time has come once again: Spotify Wrapped Day is upon us, which means your followers are about to shamelessly post their results far and wide like it’s brand new information. As for me, I’ve spent the last five years jamming to my curated catalog of music on an app you probably heard of in 2015 and never thought about again. That app is called Tidal, or, as I like to call it, “the Jay-Z one.”

Most of the time I don’t feel like an outcast for having Tidal (aside from when I’d have to queue up songs on a road trip, that is), but Wrapped Day is always the one day a year when I feel like I can no longer live in harmony with Spotify users.

Wrapped Day FOMO

As an outsider looking in all these years, Wrapped was always the biggest draw of the music streaming service to me. Sure, Spotify has plenty of other cool features that make the $10.99 monthly premium price worth it, like personalized playlists that update throughout the day, or the 15 hours of free audiobook listening time for more than 200,000 titles. Still, I never abandoned ship, because for years Tidal offered something that no other streamer could: the support of Beyoncè. And as a certified member of the BeyHive, this was all I needed to stay loyal.

However, now that Bey is seemingly no longer providing exclusive content and concert pre-sales to Tidal users — at least, that’s what her silence during the entirety of the Renaissance era would tell me — I figured it was finally time to give Spotify a try. But I may not totally be a convert quite yet.

After all, Tidal actually waits until the year is over before providing listeners with its own version of Wrapped, called Rewind. Why Spotify chooses to ignore an entire month of tracking data, I’ll never understand. How else am I supposed to tell the year-round Mariah Carey stans apart from the fakes?

That said, Spotify has been treating its users to video messages from their top Wrapped artists since 2022, which is something not even Jay-Z would’ve done at the height of Tidal’s heyday. OK, Spotify, you got me there.

Is Spotify Wrapped Ruining Instagram?

Once people find their Wrapped stats, it’s almost a given that they’ll post the results on their IG stories for all to see, making it the single worst day to be on Instagram. Every year without fail, the quietest people you went to high school with become chaotic extroverts for a day, while the most annoying person you know will boast their results proudly as if their favorite songs justify their behavior. No, you’re not in your “villain era”; you just listened to “get him back!” by Olivia Rodrigo way too much this year.

Then you have the folks with a superiority complex who act like their taste in music is totally unique, even though they share the same top-streamed artists as everyone else on your timeline. There’s no shame in listening to popular music — hey, if I were a habitual Spotify listener, Queen Bey would be topping my list every year.

No, you’re not in your “villain era”; you just listened to “get him back!” by Olivia Rodrigo way too much this year.

But let’s be real with ourselves here: these days it’s much harder to find people who aren’t listening to Taylor Swift, Boygenius, and Lana Del Rey, and I don’t need your Wrapped screenshots to tell me who is a fan and who isn’t. Being mid isn’t such a bad thing, so just own it!

We Can Live In Harmony Again

No matter how much I complain about the plight of a non-Spotify user on Wrapped Day, I know it will never be enough to stop people from posting their results — and interrupting my mindless scrolling — for 24 hours. And that’s fine; I’m not asking for that! But I don’t need to watch your whole Wrapped presentation play out on stories, either.

Respectfully, if you could spare me the details and just share the most interesting highlights from your Spotify Wrapped, it would be greatly appreciated. I’m not looking for a live reaction or a play-by-play of your less-than-shocking results. But I will compromise and settle for a small peek into your listening habits, so I can form my opinions of you (and your music taste) accordingly.

Your top artists, your most streamed songs, your favorite genres — I’ll engage with the bare minimum, and maybe even throw you a story like here or there, just as long as it doesn’t make my feed completely unbearable. Hey, I might be jaded, but I’m still nosey.

If you must check your results, you can do so by navigating to the Wrapped section of the app to find a list of your top songs, albums, and artists of the year, as well as a playlist of your 100 top songs from 2023. You should also get a pop-up to view your Wrapped as soon as you open the app on Nov. 29.