Spotify 2020 Wrapped is here — and it has some new features

Yes, it’s that time of year again: Spotify 2020 Wrapped. Been living under a rock? Let me help out. Spotify Wrapped is a feature where the company gives you a personalized breakdown of your listening habits over the year.

Is it absolutely ridiculous that it rolls this feature out at the beginning of December? When there’s technically still a full month of the year to go? A full 44,640 minutes of potential listening time (if you don’t sleep)?

Of course not. How dare you. Bow down to Spotify 2020 Wrapped, peasant. Despite this cognitive dissonance, I still kinda like the feature. You can go here to test it out, see what the world is listening to here, or just open the Spotify app on your phone.

What’s new with Spotify 2020 Wrapped?

There are a few additions to the feature this year. First off, there’s an in-app quiz. In mine it asked me to pick the artist I thought I listened to most.

A handy press shot from Spotify that shows how the quiz functionality works.

You can also track your history with your most listened to song, something I found deeply uninspiring, but here we are. Supposedly, there’s also a feature that gives you a breakdown of podcasts you listening to on Spotify, but I use a different app for that, so it didn’t appear on mine.

The company also introduced badges with Spotify 2020 Wrapped. Can’t say being given arbitrary awards really does too much for me, but you may enjoy it, so no judgement over here.

No, I take it back, if you’re excited by this you’re awful.

There are a couple of other new additions, but they’re pretty low-key. If you’re really interested, you can find out more here — but I don’t know why you’d do that to yourself.

What are your thoughts on Spotify 2020 Wrapped?

It’s fine, I guess. It’s colorful and well-designed, but I have a personal issue with it that I tend to use Spotify for music while I’m working, and do most of my active listening with my MP3 library. This means that my Spotify 2020 Wrapped is basically meaningless.

Thankfully, I still track most of my listening using Last.fm and, at the actual end of the year, it gives me a far more interesting breakdown of my music habits. No, it doesn’t have any fancy graphic design, or a Stories-esque interface, but it has data. And that’s all I really want. Check out my 2019:

GOD IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL.

What I’m saying is Spotify 2020 Wrapped is cool, but you should go and make a Last.fm account and start using that too. Of course, there’s a strong possibility you use Spotify as your main music driver, in which instance I guess it’s fine? I dunno, the social-ready design and sharing features just make me feel Spotify 2020 Wrapped is for people with awful music taste who post stuff like “TYPICAL ME,” or “NO SHOCK HERE,” or “WOULD YOU BELIEVE?” alongside the image of their listening habits.

Anyway, that’s me done — head on over here if you want to find out what Spotify thinks about you. Or go here if you’d like to see what the world is listening to. But what’s the point when it’s still 2020?

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Published December 2, 2020 — 08:57 UTC