You’d think I’d be happy that someone thinks I’m 41.
For the 10th anniversary of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming audio giant has added “nearly a dozen new and updated ways to dig deeper into the voices and stories that shaped your year.” So that personalized report you get about your 2025 music habits now offers something called Listening Age, which compares your musical tastes against others in your age group, using the release years of tracks you listen to.
As someone who’s become obsessed with putting new music in my rotation — often through playlists like Release Radar or anything with “new” in the title — I would have expected something a little younger than 41. Apparently, other people feel the same, even though Spotify warns users during Wrapped that “Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.”
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The streaming service’s algorithm-driven “Discover Weekly” playlist just turned 10, but there’s a better way to find new tunesAccording to Rolling Stone, per a conversation with Marc Hazan, Spotify’s SVP of marketing and partnerships, Listening Age is a rather complex model, where the streaming platform analyzed release dates of every track a person streamed during the year, identified the five-year span where their listening was most concentrated (relative to other listeners their actual age) and then “hypothesized what that span would suggest if the user were in their late teens or early adulthood when that music first came out.”
Turns out we’re all really, really old. Charlie XCX landed with a Listening Age of 75. Grimes is apparently 92 (maybe because she has to deal with Elon). And everyone at r/Spotify seemed to be decades beyond their real age (though the consensus is that Spotify appears to have improved Wrapped over last year’s controversial revamp).
While I’m always a little embarrassed by my personal Spotify Wrapped, I will give the streaming service credit: I think they’re right. I kind of distanced myself from new music when I was 40, only embracing it again a few years ago and getting quite aggressive about keeping current in the last 12 months. That said, my actual music taste hasn’t evolved too much — I’m into “indie punk,” per Spotify Wrapped, so listening to the new Turnstile album ad nauseum isn’t going to make me 18). And when I go to concerts, my first thought is “everyone looks like they’re in their early 40s.”
Based on other people’s reactions to Spotify’s Listening Age, I’m going to take 41 as a compliment — and maybe dig a little deeper into Spotify’s new way to exclude certain tracks from my Taste Profile.
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