“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.
I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year. And this year, for the first time, they are calculating the “listening age” of all their users.
“Taste like yours can’t be defined,” Spotify’s report informed me, “but let’s try anyway … Your listening age is 86.” The numbers were emblazoned on the screen in big pink letters.
It took a long time for my 13-year-old daughter (listening age: 19) and my 46-year-old husband (listening age: 38) to stop laughing at me. Where did I go wrong, I wondered, feeling far older than 44.
But it seems I’m not alone. “Raise your hand if you felt personally victimised by your Spotify Wrapped listening age,” wrote one user on X. Another post, with a brutal clip of Judi Dench shouting “you’re not young” at Cate Blanchett, was liked more than 26,000 times. The 22-year-old actor Louis Partridge best mirrored my reaction when he shared his listening age of 100 on Instagram stories with the caption: “uhhh”.
“Rage bait” – defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage” in order to increase web traffic – is the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year. And to me, that cheeky little message from Spotify, warning me not to take my personalised assessment of my personal listening habits personally, seemed a prime example.
“How could I have a listening age of 86?” I raged to my family and friends, when the artist I listened to the most this year was 26-year-old Sabrina Carpenter? Since I took my daughter to Carpenter’s concert at Hyde Park this summer, I have spent 722 minutes listening to her songs, making me “a top 3% global fan”.
The only explanation Spotify gave for my listening age of 86 was that I was “into music of the late 50s” this year. But my top 10 most-listened to songs were all released in the past five years and my top five artists included Olivia Dean and Chappell Roan (who released their debut albums in 2023).
Admittedly, Ella Fitzgerald is in there too. But her music is timeless, I raged; surely everyone listens to Ella Fitzgerald? “I don’t,” my daughter said, helpfully. “I don’t,” added my husband.
It’s also true that I occasionally listen to folk music from the 50s and 60s – legends such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But when I analysed my top 50 “most listened to” songs, almost all of them (80%) were released in the last five years.
What’s particularly enraging is that Spotify knows my taste is best described as “eclectic” – because that’s how Spotify has described it to me. I have apparently listened to 409 artists in 210 music genres over the past year.
None of it makes sense, until you see the extent to which inciting rage in users like me is paying off for Spotify: in the first 24 hours, this year’s Wrapped campaign had 500 million shares on social media, a 41% increase on last year.
According to Spotify, listening ages are based on the idea of a “reminiscence bump”, which they describe as “the tendency to feel most connected to the music from your younger years”. To figure this out, they looked at the release dates of all the songs I played this year, identified the five-year span of music that I engaged with more than other listeners my age and “playfully” hypothesised that I am the same age as someone who engaged with that music in their formative years.
In other words, no matter how old you are, the more unusual and idiosyncratic and out of step your musical taste is compared with your peers, the more likely it is that Spotify will poke fun at some of the music you enjoy listening to.
But now that I understand this, rather than rising to the bait, I know exactly what to do. I walk over to my dusty, ancient CD player. I insert an old CD I bought when I was a teenager. I turn the volume up to max. And then I play one of my favourite songs, a classic song that everyone who has a listening age of 86 or over will know, like I do, off by heart: You Make Me Feel So Young by Ella Fitzgerald.
