Spotify Wrapped is a fun annual roundup of your listening habits throughout the year. And every year, the music streaming app adds new features, like back in 2023, when it assigned people a Sound Town, meaning a city that supposedly matched their listening style. Spotify Wrapped was released on Wednesday, and the new features this year include a multiplayer game, Wrapped Party, and a listening age.
My actual age is 57. According to Spotify, my listening age is 79.
SEVENTY-NINE.
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President Donald Trump and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are 79. Liza Minnelli is 79. Cher — well, she’s ageless, but technically, she’s 79.
Look, I’m no teenybopper, I get it. I’m a proud Atari Wave Gen Xer. So it’s not like I was 18 and was then told I was listening to AARP tunes. But does Spotify realize how it sounds to be hit with a listening age that’s 22 years older than I really am?
What’s my age again?
I’m not the only one Spotify is aging up. My 18-year-old daughter was told she was 37, maybe because of her love of 1990s emo. Some people get aged down — my colleague Corinne Reichert’s 73-year-old mom was labeled 21. («She listens to a lot of K-pop,» her daughter says.)
Spotify pegged my colleague Jon Skillings as an octogenarian, with a listening age of 86, «since you were into music from the late ’50s.» Blame that on his passion for jazz and a healthy dose of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in his sonic excursions. At least Spotify had the good taste to play Count Basie’s 1957 version of April in Paris when it delivered the news.
«I won’t lie. That 86 did sting a little,» Skillings says. «I really thought I was mixing in a lot more tunes from this century.»
For the record, Spotify did flag a 2024 release from the contemporary jazz pianist Vijay Iyer as his top album. «See?» he says. «I can keep up with the times.»
But Skillings looks like a spring chicken next to CNET’s Ty Pendlebury, who wrote our Spotify Wrapped article and revealed that Spotify bluntly told him he was 100.
I may be old, but I got to see all the cool bands
I know 79 isn’t old to many people. I lost my sister Claudia last December at 78, and her ghost will haunt me forever if I get snippy about an age she never even got the chance to complain about. But there’s something jolting about seeing an age that’s 22 years older than you are, especially relating to music, where the industry is always riding on the back of some hot new young singer.
Do I really care? Maybe I shouldn’t. There’s a T-shirt that says something like, «I may be old, but I got to see all the cool bands.» It’s probably made for Baby Boomers, but as an Xer who saw Prince live in his hometown of Minneapolis in his best decade, the 1980s, I proudly identify with that remark.
I’ve seen some oldsters in concert, yeah, can’t deny it. A couple of years ago, I saw Steely Dan at an outdoor amphitheater near Seattle. (No static at all.) I saw folk legend Pete Seeger perform with Arlo Guthrie at the University of Minnesota one year. My mom, born in the 1920s, and my brother, a 1944-born baby, were with me, and we were all rapt. There were kids bouncing on their parents’ laps at that show. Pete and Arlo’s music knew no age. And as an 1980s concert-goer, I’ve seen bands like The Pet Shop Boys, REM, U2, Redd Kross, The Church and Pixies.
But as mom of a teenage daughter, I’ve also been flooded with more modern music, and I love it, too. Thanks to her, I’ve seen Panic! at the Disco, Alex G, Car Seat Headrest, Melanie Martinez and Slaughter Beach, Dog. And my daughter isn’t easy to categorize, either, either. She’s in an emo groove these days, listening to music from before she was born, and saw My Chemical Romance kick off their Long Live The Black Parade tour, where they performed their 2006 album The Black Parade in its entirety.
How does Spotify determine your listening age?
Spotify claims my listening age is 79, not because I sit around watching Lawrence Welk Show reruns, but because I «was into music from the early ’60s.»
I think my Spotify musical age has a lot to do with me watching the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and suddenly deciding Spotify was the perfect way to catch up on Dylan’s music. I was just a little too early for his heyday, although I lived just off the famous Highway 61, where God said to Abraham, kill me a son. OK, so I saw the movie, and I mainlined me some Dylan on Spotify.
So why not hand me a decade instead of an age? I was born in the ’60s, so dubbing me a ’60s baby would be just fine by me. (My birth year is 6-7, which should be a popular year with Gen Z and Alpha.) I grew into my musical tastes in Minneapolis in the 1980s, with Prince, The Replacements, Husker Du and The Suburbs, so call me an ’80s child and I will put that sucker on a T-shirt and flaunt it.
I’ve decided I’m going to wear my Spotify age proudly. Nobody should be shoved into a musical pigeonhole; there are great tunes from every decade, if you’re open enough to listen, and an 80-year-old can listen to whoever they choose. I’m proud that my musical tastes aren’t narrowly defined by my birth year, but instead, are open and vast.
So you’ll excuse me if I look at Spotify calling me 79 and quote an iconic song from those Gen X gurus, Nirvana:
Oh well, whatever, never mind.
