The recent conversation among students is the annual Spotify Wrapped. Sparking excitement and anticipation every year, the popular music streaming service Spotify makes a yearly review and gives interesting statistics on what you listened to. A school-wide form asked for the results of our very own students listening.
As shown in the form most students at Wilsonville use Spotify. A dominant 80.6% streams through Spotify, 14% through Apple Music, and 5.4% through other miscellaneous services.
Reviewing the answers, no easy pattern is found. Students listen to about all artists, from Taylor Swift to King Gizzard the Lizard Wizard. Our school’s top three artists from the form are Kanye West and a three-way tie between Taylor Swift, Zach Bryan, and Tyler, The Creator.
These artists may be our most common but not at all by far. Results showed more artists than one could ever know, showing the diverse tastes of students, despite being within the same age range and community. Although, not all students were pleased with their artists’ results.
Many complained their results from Spotify lacked interesting statistics or they expressed disagreement on who their main artist should be. For example, in one response a student was angry about their number one result being Morgan Wallen, knowing just two of his songs.
Another student wasn’t in disagreement with his top artist but felt it could have had more. Truman Wilding, a Sophomore said he would like,” Listening time for more artists than just your top one.”
“I know I listened to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard the most but I have no idea how much that is about my other favorite artists.”
Listening minutes were also tracked through the form and answers were split roughly in four quarters. 28.2% of users listened to 0-25k minutes, 29.4% listened to 25k-50k, 20% to 50k-75k, and 22.4% were hardcore listeners hitting over 75k.
More interesting yet headache-inducing numbers to calculate were the number of songs listened to and amount of artists. Shocking answers ranged from 5 songs to 13,986 and 3 to artists to 3,417.
Using the format taught by Mr. Humphreys, the stats summarized in a college-level sentence show the distribution of our song results is a right-skewed distribution with a median of 1,125 and an average of 1,821.
The numbers calculated for artists were right-skewed and had a median of 536.5 and an average of 774 having a whooping range of 3,414.
This wrapped, a new idea was tested; giving your taste throughout the year interesting names. At Wilsonville, many weren’t very fond results of this. Students like Sean Sanchez found his taste being called” McBling Hollywood pop,” more lazy and strange than entertaining.
Frequent comments were made calling out Spotify, noting how their use of AI was much too obvious and became annoying when looking at their monthly listening trend labels.
Jaisie Dalglish was more sympathetic, saying she didn’t mind the idea but it wasn’t executed well with strange animations and graphics. That being a very common statement, most did not enjoy the strange names or the confusing graphics.
Before you complain too much remember: numbers don’t lie if your taste is basic it’s not Spotify’s fault.