Social Media for Antisocial People

Like many people—at least in my approximate socioeconomic class—I checked my Spotify Wrapped as soon as I saw it was available this week.

At the end of the year, Spotify gives some cute slides about your year in music with the musicians, songs, and genres that you listened to most on Spotify over the year, as well as comparisons as to how much you do that compared to others. Spotify Wrapped is huge amongst my peers—dozens of my friends share it via Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, and especially Instagram.

I am not above sharing it myself. It’s a good time, though I definitely notice the glaring gaps in their process. This year, the most glaring and questionable data point was what Spotify calls “listening age.” The listening age is ostensibly how old you seem to be based on what Spotify calls the “reminiscence bump”— the tendency to listen to music from one’s formative years.. They ostensibly take your listening history, compare it to others and then “playfully hypothesises” a listening age based on how old you would have to be to want to listen to that music.

This is quite simply a steaming lump of horseshit, and really seems to be the barest most half-assed excuse to hang together something for us to share. Spotify Wrapped has just enough data to appear plausible, slapped together with a veneer to get us to post it for others to see. We think we’re sharing our Spotify Wrapped, but mostly what we’re sharing is the idea of having Spotify Wrapped. “Spotify Wrapped is the most successful marketing tactic of the last 10 years,” said Troy Osinoff, a digital marketing entrepreneur was quoted in The Guardian. “[It is] built on one simple idea: people are obsessed with themselves.” Spotify Wrapped is going for surprising and hooky, not useful or accurate.

Which makes sense because what I find remarkable about Spotify is how little actual information you get out of them for the price of relying on them for a year. You get some dubious data like “It’s like I’m 73 years old,” along with your five most listened artists and songs, some basic facts about how many artists you listened to, or how many minutes of music you listened to, and then you’re compared to all Spotify listeners on one or two random data points. You may find, like I did, that you’re in the top 1% of Radiohead users on the app, which sounds impressive until you find out that there are 713 million Spotify users.

It shares all this information in a couple of slides that you can easily share them to Facebook or Instagram if you like.

Spotify Wrapped is the apotheosis of social media on both a publishing and a consumption fashion. Spotify Wrapped is built to be shared, but also built for you to quickly skim through everyone else’s shares. No one is deeply interested in anyone’s Wrapped but their own, the same way that no one is deeply interested in our picture of our dinner or you vacation. We’re all perfectly happy to skim our results and move past them to the next post. I am mildly happy to see that my friend’s listening age is the exact same as mine, but I don’t remember a single one of her artists and she won’t remember a single one of mine, and that’s okay.

It’s Web 2.0. Everyone is sharing, everyone is reading, but we’re all mostly focused on ourselves.

Web 2.0 has been around for a long time—I am from the cusp of Gen X and Millennials, what I’ve sometimes seen called the Oregon Trail Generation, and the transition from computers being a glorified typewriter into this device in my pocket that brings me connected into the thoughts, fears, and presence of the entire world has been one of the most important changes in my life. I got onto the web actively by 1997 and I’ve lived there the entire time, wedged very actively for most of the time in what’s often been called Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 started to be popularized around 2004 when fast internet speeds became ubiquitous rather than just for college students, and social media started to blossom and fragment. Web 2.0 is the social web, where going onto the computer meant going online, and major parts of the web were created and run users for the consumption and comparison of other users. Blogs, social media, photo sharing sites, run trackers, music trackers, and video content and curation, all of this is social media.

Feel free to let your eyes kind of drift over these next few paragraphs, rather than soak it all up, because it will make your brain bleed if you let us.

The key features of Web 2.0, from Wikipedia, which is a pivotal pillar of the Web 2.0 ecosystem

1. Folksonomy – free classification of information; allows users to collectively classify and find information (e.g. “tagging” of websites, images, videos or links)

2. Rich user experience – dynamic content that is responsive to user input (e.g., a user can “click” on an image to enlarge it or find out more information)

3. User participation – information flows two ways between the site owner and site users by means of evaluation, review, and online commenting. Site users also typically create user-generated content for others to see (e.g., Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can write articles for or edit)

4. Software as a service (SaaS) – Web 2.0 sites developed APIs to allow automated usage, such as by a Web “app” (software application) or a mashup

5. Mass participation – near-universal web access leads to differentiation of concerns, from the traditional Internet user base (who tended to be hackers and computer hobbyists) to a wider variety of users, drastically changing the audience of internet users.

Doesn’t that just make the inside of your eyeballs crawl to read?

I started to realize that I was getting old when I started to joke about how I was making the jump to Web 3.0 from Web 2.0 by using Social Media in Antisocial Fashion. I started using Goodreads only to log my own books, rather than to discover new ones recommended by other people, I log my Letterboxed to track my movies, and ignore everyone else’s.

And I started to track my music rather than to compare it to any one else’s music. This is where I see that the internet has left me behind. I’m on Spotify, because it’s a great way to listen to music and organize my music, even though it’s an evil corporation. But I’m also on Spotify because it connects perfectly with Last.fm, a vastly superior way to track your music listening.

I’ve been on Last.fm since 2005, I’ve “scrobbled” (their word for Listened to in a Manner That We Captured) 236,560 tracks in the 20 years. This is not a complete record of my music listening for the last 20 years, since scrobbling was difficult in some ways to record, and so anything I listened to on an iPod or when the software connection broke down was lost. But it’s a lot of data, and ironically Spotify integrates very well with Last.fm.

The great thing for me about Last.fm is that it shows detailed charts of everything I listen to, with precise counts. It quantifies and calculates much more precisely and accurately the last 20 years of music listening for me, way more than Spotify does, in a much more straightforward way. It doesn’t have as many flashy social media slides, but it has charts and graphs.

You can see charts of every artist, song, and album you listened to, broken out over the last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days 180 days, 365 days, or overall. It’s not perfect. It really struggles with slight name differences, so my listens to Stop Making Sense and Stop Making Sense (Deluxe Edition) are being calculated separately, which as a data guy drives me insane and has meant I’ve instituted very strict data cleanliness guidelines as to which versions of albums and songs I listen. But it’s always available and being updated, so I can see the top 50 albums I listened to this year, rather than the top five.

It does make me crazy in ways that I’m basically okay with. Rather than just listening to music all year and getting a mid-December report card as to what I listened to the most, I regularly review what I’m listening to and change playlists as a result. Last.fm turns every playlist into a Heisenberg Uncertainty Playlist; I’m constantly seeing that I’m listening to a song too much, or another song is languishing behind, or a song I’ve forgotten that I love is just waiting to catch up. I can’t look at my charts without changing how I’m filling the charts..

These charts make it clear that Spotify Wrapped isn’t playing fair. Looking at the most viral part of Spotify Wrapped, the “listening age,” with my charts, Spotify declared I was 73 years old, due to all the music I listen to from the 60s.

Per Last.FM, my top ten albums were all from the 1990s (or very close). I listened to a very heavy dose of Oasis, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, REM, and Chappell Roan. Yes, I occasionally would listen to David Bowie or Bob Dylan or Fleetwood Mac. My “73 year old” diagnosis is coming from a couple deviations from the mean, rather than the vast majority of my listening. I did not, in any way, primarily listen to music from the 60s, but the algorithm needed something with just enough truthiness to hang a number on that I would share.

It was built to be shared, not to be useful. Which ultimately is a good diagnosis of this entire terminal Web 2.0 era; things are built for their memetic infectiousness, not if they’re good or true or helpful. it’s what ultimately makes me anti-social. But at least I have some good music.

My most listened to track was, unsurprisingly, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” but since I posted that at least once already down here Below Ground, I’ll have to go with track number two—note that this is from the 1990s as well, not the 60s.