Spotify Wrapped 2022 into the genre-verse and Aussietronica
1 December 2022
Spotify Wrapped for 2022 has dropped, and once again the music streaming service is bamboozling listeners with custom genre definitions and statistics that apparently place some listeners into what appear to be elite music listening categories. And it also looks like we have listening personalities.
One of my top genres — in what Spotify now call the genre-verse, a nod to Mastodon’s fediverse perhaps — is a genre dubbed Aussietronica. To spare scrolling pages and pages of search engine results, I’m going to take a punt here, because it seems quite self-explanatory, and state the obvious: this is Australian made electronica. I’d simply call it electronica, but have to admit Aussietronica is kind of cute, and maybe saves us from having to say “Australian made electronica” all the time.
And for a moment I thought I was kind of special when Wrapped informed me I was among the top five percent of listeners of Sydney based, yeah, Aussietronica act RÜFÜS DU SOL. I played their 2021 track Alive on loop earlier this year as I was re-booting disassociated. But a glance at Twitter trending revealed I was anything but special. Some people are finding themselves in even more exclusive bands, such as, but not limited to, point zero five percent.
I also learned I have a listening personality. To be precise I have a listening personality type, just like you (allegedly) have a Myers–Briggs type. My listening personality type, according to Spotify is F T L U, being Familiarity Timelessness Loyalty Uniqueness. The Replayer, they call me. The F and the L are doubtless a result of the aforementioned looping of Alive.
Listening personalities, all be they a gimmick, are kind of cool though. In fact I’ll go out on a limb and declare the Spotify listening personalities might just be a little more scientific than the other type indicator. But Wrapped is, according the Wikipedia page, a viral marketing campaign, so it is doing its job, getting the interwebs excited, once again, about our music listening preferences and habits.
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