It’s that time of year again.
We’re on the final straight to Christmas via the annual office party shmooze, and just as we approach the time when everyone starts telling us what to listen to in 2020, out comes streaming giant Spotify with Spotify Wrapped, a handy infographic that floods the world’s social media feeds on what music you’ve been hammering over the past 12 months.
As we’re also at the end of another decade it’s thrown in the bonus treat of illuminating your favourite artist of the last 10 years – and this is where you see if you’ve been bingeing on the cool or the cringe-worthy.
While you might be umming and ahhing about whether to share with the world that you exclusively listened to Craig David’s 7 Days in 2013 or played Thank U, Next on repeat after a tough break up last year, I urge you to own your guilty pleasures.
We should wear these songs like a badge of honour because music is all about making connections, and having these artists on your Wrapped means their work has struck a chord.
My Spotify Wrapped showed that my most listened to artist this year was Rival Consoles, who makes expansive, ambient and atmospheric electronic music (which occasionally enters the territory of a techno banger).
As a DJ and music journalist who very much champions left-field alternative and electronic music, the main result was not surprising.
What was slightly more so was that it highlighted my love for the catalogues of pop princesses Beyonce, Dua Lipa and Mabel and the heavy rotation of Miley Cyrus’s Slide Away. And I’m not ashamed to say it.
With access to the world’s music online on these small devices we carry around and look at far too much, there’s no place for shaming others for the music they love.
Peoples’ tastes are more diverse than ever. The snobby garden walls of music subcultures have, in some ways, crumbled into dust since we stopped being able to boast about our CD collection.
Whether you’ve been in heartbreak hotel or riding high on the wings of love, spending your time in the house of fun or the house of pain will no doubt discern what’s been played in your ears.
And this is a glorious development.
Music is such a personal thing, often impacted by your year’s life events and circumstances, too. Whether you’ve been in heartbreak hotel or riding high on the wings of love, spending your time in the house of fun or the house of pain will no doubt discern what’s been played in your ears.
My tastes from the past year include everything from Lana Del Rey to Foals, Little Simz to Nick Cave, Floating Points and James Blake.
While my Apple Music playlists is a collection of the music I’m being sent, playing on the radio, writing about, putting in DJ sets, my Spotify account is purely for pleasures, sometimes of the guilty kind.
In case you want to start measuring up, Post Malone and Billie Eilish were the top streamed artists of the year – and by and large, 2019 has gifted us some top quality music.
While in the main Ed Sheeran and Drake might be the most streamed artists of the decade (in which streaming also became the prominent way of listening) it hasn’t changed the fact that people by nature tend to revisit the artists they love.
This is why Rihanna is in the top streamed females of the decade and we haven’t had an album from her since Anti in 2016.
As much as people want the new music beast fed constantly, the artists that endure are those that make the most timeless music that we want to go back to because it’s comforting and makes us feel something.
And if that feeling manifests itself in us singing Taylor Swift’s classic Shake It Off into a hairbrush, there shouldn’t be any shame in that.
With music being so communal it’s a lovely thing that you can get an insight into your own habits with Spotify Wrapped and share your music discoveries with others, even if there’s a slightly unhealthy amount of Celine Dion lurking in the midst.
If I’m to practice what I’m preaching here, the more that’s said about that the better!
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