Spotify Wrapped: how is Wrapped made and how many hours of music do users listen to each year?

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That is a lot of music! 🎶
  • Spotify users listen to hundreds of hours of music each year. 
  • It makes pulling together the Wrapped round-up a mammoth task. 
  • A few years ago, Spotify lifted the curtain slightly on the science behind Wrapped. 

Spotify Wrapped is drawing ever closer as the chill of autumn settles in. The nights are getting darker and soon we will be unwrapping our yearly music round-up. 

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The exact date remains top secret, but I played detective to see if I could figure it out. Fans who are wondering when they can start queuing up the Christmas tunes and other guilty pleasures, may have to wait a bit longer as the counting period will continue into November. 

The streaming giant is also urging fans to update the app in a message that appears when opening up Spotify. It promises that this is to make it ‘Wrapped ready’. 

If you are feeling nostalgic you may want to find your old Spotify Wrapped playlists - and the good news is they are just a click away. But how do they pull together the annual round-ups? 

How many hours do people listen to Spotify a year? 

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Spotify Wrapped will appear on the home page of your app. Image: SpotifySpotify Wrapped will appear on the home page of your app. Image: Spotify
Spotify Wrapped will appear on the home page of your app. Image: Spotify | Spotify

The task of tracking users' listening habits on Spotify is an absolutely mammoth one. It might seem simple on the face of it, but we all listen to a staggering amount of songs/ podcasts/ audiobooks on the streaming platform each year. 

HighTouch reports that on average in the US, people stream two hours per day on Spotify which works out at about 743 hours each year. And of course there are those who stream significantly more than that. 

Which means that there is a heck of a lot of data for Spotify to keep a track of - so how do they pull off such a mammoth task? 

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So, how do they make Spotify Wrapped? 

Spotify obviously keeps a tight lid on the exact mechanics behind its Wrapped round-ups - and unless you are working for the engineering teams, you will probably never know for sure how it works. But they did slightly lift the curtain in early 2020 to discuss how they pulled off the decade round-up for the 2010s. 

You can read the full article on Spotify’s website here. It details how the Wrapped Team itself “encompasses many sub-teams” that are responsible for everything from marketing, legal, and design, to data, frontend and backend engineering.

Interestingly they also revealed that the teams who help make Wrapped possible are “largely made up of volunteers” from across other departments inside Spotify. To make the end of decade wrap-up possible in 2019, Spotify used Google Cloud Bigtable because it is “highly optimised for aggregating data over an arbitrary time range”. 

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For the end of decade Wrapped, they wrote a “python library” (Python is a computer programming language) to read the data needed to create the round-up. There is more detail in the article on Spotify’s website, if you want to dive into the nitty gritty. 

Are you looking forward to Spotify Wrapped this year - or is it overrated? Share your thoughts by emailing me: [email protected].

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