As I write this, we find ourselves in a peculiar time of the year. You know the one I’m talking about, when the weather turns bitterly cold, we get our first glimpse of snow, it’s dark for most of the day, and despite the subzero temperatures, the streets are awash with people out and about on a mission to eat, drink and make merry. It may seem like I’m talking about the onset of winter and the festive period, but this isn’t a post about the holidays or the decades-old traditions and customs they bring. No, this is a post about a more recent phenomenon, one that’s less than a decade old. I’m talking about Spotify Wrapped.
I recognise that some people reading this may live in countries where Spotify isn’t available, so to provide a brief introduction (or recap if you’re already familiar with it), Spotify is the largest music streaming platform, and every year since 2016, at the end of November or the beginning of December, they’ve pushed a feature that enables listeners to share some stats on the music they’ve listened to. There’s a corresponding feature for musicians, which enables them to share stats on how often, when, and where their music has been listened to. This feature is called Spotify Wrapped.
What happens when Spotify Wrapped comes around each year, is that you start seeing the same sorts of posts by listeners and musicians alike. They share the same vibrant colour schemes, slick fonts, and pithy captions. In these posts, listeners subtly signal or expressly state how much time they spent listening to their favourite music, and/or reiterate how much they love certain musicians. Musicians also hint at the blockbuster year they’ve had, and then, in some cases, go on to take more of an appreciative tone. “Thank you for the support, see you next year,” is how it usually goes.
But then, there are those who just stay silent, those who don’t participate in this annual ritual. Case in point, me. I haven’t posted any Spotify Wrapped for the past few years, and I’m not going to, not as a listener, and not as a musician either. I’ve decided to not jump on the bandwagon because somewhere deep down, I feel like my numbers aren’t worth sharing, and I feel this way both as a listener and as a musician. As a listener, Spotify isn’t my go-to for music, and on the handful of occasions when I use the platform, I tend to play the same songs on repeat, some might say obsessively. The thing is, while I’m happy to admit this openly, I’m less willing to put the evidence on display.
In a similar vein, as a musician, my stats don’t feel that impressive compared to what I see around me. My social media feed consists mostly of other musicians sharing their numbers, and they make my numbers look like child’s play. The thing is, I know that this comparison doesn’t help me, I know we can’t base our decisions on what we see on social media because social media is full of other people’s highlights and high points and we don’t get to see the lows that permeate their day to day. Comparison is the thief of joy, as the old expression goes. And yet, I can’t help but compare and contrast, because I’m human, and despite all this knowledge about how harmful comparison is, I still can’t help but engage in it sometimes.
The flip side to this is that while I have little control over my first instincts, I have full control over the thoughts I allow to dwell in my mind. It is through this lens that I write this post because there’s an even better reason for me not to obsess over my Spotify Wrapped. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a proponent of art for the sake of art, and that I’ve been working hard to divorce my sense of progress in my art from vanity metrics. In other words, I no longer see my progress in my artistic exploits as something tied to what the numbers say, or what they should say. This, for me, is a focus on quality rather than quantity. It shouldn’t matter whether a song has been heard by 2 people or 2000 people. What should matter is the sort of impact the song has had on the people who have listened to it. I may never truly know the impact my music has on people, but on occasion, people reach out to share their experiences with me and it makes it all worthwhile.
From the young couple across the Atlantic who reached out to tell me they’ve made one of my songs the soundtrack for their relationship, to my friends inviting me to play some of my songs at their wedding, from the kind stranger on the Internet who felt the need to share that he had a delightful summer evening listening to my music while enjoying some wine out in his garden, to a work colleague who suggested my music as background listening for one of his social support groups, every one of these encounters is worth more than an arbitrary number that is meant to serve as a substitute for popularity and a proxy for success.
Of course, all things being equal, if I had to choose between an audience of 2 and an audience of 2000, I’d choose the latter. There’s something about my human nature that inclines me to believe that it is better to have 2000 listeners as opposed to 2 listeners. It just feels intuitive, natural, nicer. 2000 should always trump 2, right? That said, in keeping with the quality-over-quantity mantra, I’d rather have 2 listeners who make meaningful connections to my music than 2000 listeners who don’t. I appreciate that this isn’t mutually exclusive; it isn’t a choice between 2 engaged listeners and 2000 disengaged ones. However, a fixation on numbers and the veneration of growth at all costs detract from the things that truly matter, which, in my opinion, are quality and purpose – the quality of the listening experience, and the purpose behind the creation of the music.
Here comes the part of the blog post where I issue a caveat: numbers and metrics aren’t always the enemy. Metrics can be (and are often) valuable. They help to provide points of reference – benchmarks – that enable us to assess progress, as long as we measure and track the right things, as opposed to tracking the easy things just because they’re easy to track. So if I may leave you with one last thought (or three) on the increasingly popular phenomenon that is Spotify Wrapped, it’s this: share your numbers, or don’t, it’s up to you, really. Your decision to share your Spotify Wrapped, or to abstain from doing so, makes a statement, and inherent in that statement is the value you place on the art you make or engage with. It shouldn’t be a popularity contest or a zero-sum game, because at the end of the day, metrics are just that, metrics. By themselves, they’re just shy of meaningless. Their value lies in their purpose and interpretation. Whatever you choose to do, it helps to not lose sight of why you listen to the music you listen to, or why you make the music you make.
P.S.: My middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas is out everywhere now. My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way is also available everywhere now. They’ll make excellent stocking fillers or holiday presents for the children and art lovers in your life, respectively. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.