"Age is just a number." That was the first hint that I was about to receive some very bad news.
I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover, having celebrated my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, it was the day that Spotify released "Spotify Wrapped," its analysis of how much time I spent listening to music on its platform last year (4,863 minutes in my case). And this year, for the first time, they calculated a "listening age" for all their users.
"Taste like yours can't be determined," the Spotify report stated, "but we'll try... Your listening age is 86." The numbers were displayed in large pink letters on the screen.
It took my 13-year-old daughter (listening age: 19) and my 46-year-old husband (listening age: 38) a long time to stop teasing me. Where did I go wrong, I thought, I was much older than 44.
But I'm not alone. "Raise your hand if you felt personally offended by your Spotify Wrapped listening age," one user wrote on X. Another post, with a crude clip of Judi Dench yelling at Cate Blanchett: "You're not young," was liked over 26,000 times. Louis Partridge, a 22-year-old actor, best expressed my reaction when he shared his listening age of 100 on Instagram Stories with the caption: "Uh."
"Rage bait" - defined as "online content that is intentionally designed to provoke anger or outrage" to drive web traffic - is the Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year. And for me, this sly little message from Spotify, warning me not to take my personalized assessment of my personal listening habits personally, seemed like a perfect example.
"How can I have a listening age of 86?" I fumed at my family and friends, when my most listened to artist this year was 26-year-old Sabrina Carpenter? After taking my daughter to a Carpenter concert at Hyde Park this summer, I spent 722 minutes listening to her songs, making me a "top 3% global fan."
The only explanation Spotify gave me for my listening age of 86 was that I was "into 50s music" this year. But my top 10 most listened to songs across the past five years were all recent, and my top 5 artists included Olivia Rodrigo and Chapolet Roan (who released their debut albums in 2023).
It's true, Ella Fitzgerald is. But her music is timeless, I raged; don't we all listen to Ella Fitzgerald? "Not me," my daughter said, helpfully. "Not me," my husband added.
It's true, I sometimes listen to 50s and 60s folk music - legends like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. But when I analyzed my top 50 "most listened to" songs, almost all of them (80%) were released in the past five years.
It's particularly infuriating that Spotify knows my taste is best described as "eclectic" - because that's how Spotify describes it for me. I apparently listened to 409 artists across 210 musical genres last year.
None of it makes sense until you realize how similar this outrage bait pays off for me, like Spotify: in the first 24 hours of the Wrapped campaign this year, there were 500 million shares on social media, a 41% increase from last year.
According to Spotify, the listening age is based on the "nostalgia bump," which they describe as "the tendency to feel most connected to music from your youth." To calculate this, they looked at the release dates of all the songs I listened to this year, identified a five-year span of music I was more engaged with than other listeners my age, and "happily" hypothesized that I'm the same age as the person who connected with that music in their formative years.
In other words, no matter how old you are, the more unusual and eclectic and unrelated your musical tastes are to your peers, the more likely Spotify is to mock some of the music you listen to.
But now that I understand this, instead of falling for the outrage bait, I know exactly what to do. I'm going to my dusty, ancient CD player. I'm going to put on an old CD I bought when I was a teenager. I'm going to turn the volume up to max. And then I'm going to listen to one of my favorite songs, a classic song that everyone who has a listening age of 86 or more knows as well as I do: Ella Fitzgerald's You Make Me Feel So Young.
