Did Spotify Wrapped Give You A Strange 'Listening Age'? Here's How It Works

Did Spotify Wrapped Give You a Strange ‘Listening Age’? Here’s How It Works

Last updated: 2025/12/03 at 1:02 PM

News Room Published 3 December 2025

Spotify Wrapped is full of new features for 2025, including a quiz, your most-listened to albums, clips from authors and podcasters, and a new Listening Age statistic.

Listening Age “compares your musical tastes to others in your age group,” based on the release years of the tracks you listened to most, Spotify says. For some, the number has come as a shock. (I’m 76 apparently, probably because I’ve been working my way through Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums this year.)

According to Spotify, the Listening Age is based on a psychological concept called the “reminiscence bump,” which refers to the tendency for adults over 40 to recall more events from their youth and early adulthood than from other stages of their lives. Spotify speculates that many listeners show a “tendency to feel most connected to the music from your younger years.”

To put together your Listening Age within Wrapped, Spotify takes the release date of every song you’ve listened to between Jan. 1 and an undisclosed date in October or November. Spotify then pools these results together to find a five-year span of music that you listened to more than other listeners your age. This part makes your result less likely to match your actual age, even if you listen to a lot of music specifically from your youth.

Spotify says it will then assume you were between 16 and 21 years old in that five-year span, and use this “reminiscence bump” to help it figure out your Listening Age.

If you mostly listen to songs from the early 2000s, that suggests you were born in the mid-1980s, so your listening age lands in your early 40s. Another example is those who listen to a lot of music from the 1960s would be given an age between 70 and 80.

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Spotify says it’s “playfully” hypothesizing with this feature rather than aiming to be accurate. The idea behind these types of year-end features is also to generate online buzz. Remember the Sound Town feature from 2023 that told people where they should live based on their listening habits? It got a lot of people talking, so an age-based feature is likely to do the same, with people pleased or outraged by Spotify’s estimate.

You can access your Spotify Wrapped on the mobile version of the company’s services now.