From driving to school, to doing homework, to just listening in order to pass time, music plays an important role in nearly everyone’s lives. As 2022 comes to an end, there is one annual tradition that music lovers look forward to: Spotify Wrapped. Spotify Wrapped is a collection of the specific listeners’ top artists, songs, genres and minutes spent listening to music. In addition, Spotify also creates a playlist of the listeners top 100 songs with an additional one added by Spotify. We wanted to take a look at how students’ listening taste varies around Foothill Technology High School (Foothill Tech).

While the statistics are quite interesting to some, they are not for everyone. To keep all listeners engaged, Spotify included a “listening personality.” Similar to last year’s “color aura,” it is a feature that tells the listener what their music taste says about their personality. In a similar format to a Myers-Briggs test, Spotify based their listening personalities on four sets of comparisons: “familiarity versus exploration, loyalty versus variety, timeliness versus newness, and commonality versus uniqueness” according to KSBY.

While the video only focuses on Spotify listeners, Apple Music has also hopped on the bandwagon in creating “Apple Replay,” which is similar in the way that it shows users their top songs, artists and albums, however, it does not have the same entertaining themes or personality tests as Spotify.

This year’s designs were either adored or despised. The very colorful palette could be considered an eyesore for some, however, I thought that their designs were quite unique to Spotify and made them an easily identifiable upgrade compared to previous years. This year’s Spotify Wrapped was one of my favorites so far and many are already looking forward to what Spotify will do next year.