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Spotify Introduces Listening Location Feature ‘Sound Towns’ In 2023 Wrapped

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Summary:

  • Spotify Wrapped day arrives, revealing top artists and songs, along with quirky city assignments based on musical profile.

  • Social media reacts with memes and jokes to Spotify’s new city feature, sparking creativity and speculation among users.

  • Some users take the opportunity to promote local artists from the cities assigned in Spotify Wrapped.

The much awaited global holiday has at last arrived–Spotify Wrapped day. Taylor Swift took the crown for the most listened to artist of the year, and Spotify users everywhere finally learned what their top songs of the year were. In addition to a calculation of the number of minutes spent using the streaming platform, users’ top songs and artists, and general listening vibe (vampires, time travelers, and more were a part of this year’s wrapped), Spotify also featured a new measure of listening personality–a city given to each user based on their musical profile.

Among some of the notable cities were Burlington, Vermont, Provo, Utah, San Luis Obispo, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Fans of the Wrapped process continue to theorize as to why such a feature was included this year. Some joke that the streaming giant must be working with the government to repopulate small cities and towns across the U.S., or that someone at headquarters is secretly hoping to set up a number of LGBTQ+ friendly communes. Spotify users raced to X and TikTok to analyze what exactly these cities meant and what they determined about a person. This social analysis at hand, a number of memes continue to be born.

Social Media Reactions To Spotifygate

Some X users brought back a number of historic pop culture references. Notably, an image of teenagers in the U.K. dressed in some of the most notable 2010s Tumblr fashion trends is circulating with captions taking guesses at which Spotify city’s population it could represent.

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Additionally, some joke that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders must have been behind the popular Burlington, Vermont suggestion. Sanders has long spoken highly of the state he represents, even famously wearing a pair of local crafted mittens to the 2021 presidential inauguration of President Joe Biden. The image of the senator sporting the mittens became a meme in itself.

Others present puns surrounding the city names provided in Spotify Wrapped.

According to the display screen, the cities were handed out based on the per capita of users with similar top five artists in each respective area.

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Some are taking the strange Spotify suggestions as an opportunity to bring attention to local artists from the cities in question.

Others joked in light of the recent release of “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes” that Spotify users assigned to different cities should have their own hunger games in the Las Vegas Sphere.

Some continue to question the reasoning for this new feature, as further context is yet to be provided by the streaming platform.

Happy Spotify Wrapped Day to all, and to all a good flight to Burlington, Vermont.

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