#147 How bad is your music?

It’s that time of the year again! When people share gifts, goodwill and their Spotify Wrapped playlists.

For the uninitiated, in December, Spotify compiles a playlist for each of its users to recap their listening habits over the past year. From the song you played on loop for weeks on end, and your top genres to that artist you’ve been obsessed with, your Wrapped is a nice summary of it all.

But that’s not as interesting to me as people’s reactions to their Wrapped playlists.

Come the first week of December, and my Instagram is flooded with stories of everyone’s top 5 tracks, genres and artists. Great way to get some music recommendations. But that’s still not the most interesting part. 

The most intriguing people are those who publicly confess to having carefully curated their Spotify. And those who furiously begin devising strategies to prevent Spotify from producing a similarly embarrassing playlist next year.

Tactics range from using private sessions (Spotify’s incognito mode, basically) to moving their Bollywood listening exclusively to other platforms.

Are you one of these people, deeply ashamed of your listening choices? Or do you think you have a quality taste? Let this savage AI be the judge.

It’s been trained on a corpus of indicators of objectively good music to give you an evidence-based judgement on your taste in music. And I really mean it when I use the word judgement. It is not designed to spare your feelings. Be warned. 

Ria

P.S. Can’t gather the courage to tell your friend their music sucks? Forward this to them, and let AI do it instead.