At the end of the year, listeners on Spotify excitedly check out their Spotify Wrapped waiting for their listening habits to be revealed.
Throughout the year, Spotify has tracked every listener’s music genres, songs, and artists. Behind this cool display of music over the years, there is a lot of math and analytics that go along with these findings.
Spotify Wrapped comes out at the end of each year. It contains the top songs and artists listeners have listened to throughout the year. Spotify also includes the vibes and more information about the listening habits over the past year.
“I love receiving my Spotify Wrapped at the end of every year. It’s interesting seeing all the songs and artists I enjoyed the most and how I have changed over the year,” Evelyn Morel (12) said.
Spotify Wrapped keeps people engaged in using Spotify and many listeners look forward to receiving this every year. There are different steps to make this Spotify Wrapped everyone cares about so much.
“When having all the music someone has listened to for the year, the first step would likely be looking for trends in the data,” stats teacher Stacey Behrensmeyer said. “If you keep going back to the same genre or artist then calculating the number of minutes, songs, or the times you replay the same music.”
For the visuals of Spotify Wrapped, the first step into making these visuals and designs would be after Spotify records all the data.
“Spotify is recording everything you play, and there are different programs you can use to change those visualizations into charts and graphs and stuff like that,” AP computer science teacher, Sam Volpenhein said. “We use one in this class called Tableau where you store data.”
For the making of Spotify Wrapped, there are other requirements to do and factors to take into account.
“Like almost any major computer software, it is very likely that they update/improve upon the software every year to ensure the accuracy and decrease the likelihood of glitches,” Hannah Smith (9) said.
Spotify most likely requires listeners to listen to a certain amount of music in order to have a wrapped.
If they do not listen to enough music, then they might not have enough top artists and songs to record. Spotify also stores all the information about a listener’s music taste in different technologies.
“Spotify probably stores large amounts of data in servers. They have special computers called servers that provide services and some of those servers are called data services,” Volpenhein said.
The statistics, technology, and analytics in the making of Spotify Wrapped can be similar to what teachers teach at Highlands. In Behrensmeyer’s stats class, students learn about collecting data. For Spotify Wrapped, it is important to collect all the data from the listeners music.
“In my stats class, we learned about collecting data, finding trends, and taking samples. I can imagine this is similar to how Spotify creates its Spotify Wrapped,” Morel said.
AP Computer Science also learns things that are similar to the technology behind Spotify Wrapped.
“Spotify has a lot of different sciences and in computer science we do a lot of different things too, so if it’s what people see and the graphics or the data behind it, they’re just different aspects we learn,” Volpenhein said.
There are a lot of technologies, analytics, and statistics working together to be able to produce Spotify Wrapped.
“There are many different aspects and ideas going into Spotify Wrapped and working together to be able to show everyones wrapped successfully and accurately,” Behrensmeyer said.