The Slightly Late and semi-irrelevant Spotify Wrapped Blog

One of the many things about December is that one's favorite apps attempt to tell you what you "did" over the given year... giving one largely irrelevant stats that... if you think about it, you probably already knew and mostly don't care about. 

However, sometimes, the wholly irrelevant does actually give insight into how one uses a specific program and/or how the program actually uses you. 

So, it goes with my Spotify Wrapped countdown presented by Spotify. Who, for example, could have possibly guessed that my #1 artist of the year was going to be Babymetal. It isn't as if the AI underneath the Spotify engine realizes that I like Babymetal. Or, I like Babymetal songs. Or, that I listened to the full Metal Forth album on Spotify when it came out and before I actually received the physical CD. Or, that the program then leverages that knowledge when it presents me with various playlists to potentially listen to or when I decide to listen to music via the AI generated DJ feature.



Now, to be completely fair... because of how I listen to music on Spotify... there are a number of data points that don't actually fit my general paradigm of music. For example, I do like a few Band-Maid songs... but I would not consider them one of my favorite bands of this or any other year. Yet, the Spotify algorithm places them in the same category as Babymetal... and therefore it serves me a lot of Band-Maid regardless. From a perspective of what I would prefer listening to... Hagane, Trident, Passcode, Gacharic Spin, Lonesome Blue and any number of other bands would be fine. Or, they could even go older school and serve me Seikima-II or X-Japan or Loudness.

And, while I do not dispute that Spotify often served me Song 3 (Babymetal's collaboration with Slaughter to Prevail)... that song is my least favorite on the album. Alas, giving me more White Flame or Algorism was not in the cards.

But, at least Spotify knew exactly how old I am.



I joke, of course as, depending on how I define my age, I am either quite a bit younger or quite a bit older. By almost the same number of years.

Now, the other thing that caught me by surprise is that I listened to 141 genres according to Spotify. Now, for anyone who actually knows me, this is not surprising. However, it does bring up an interesting question that is almost certainly unable to be answered. What the hell is a genre? Certainly, my top-5 genres of the year doesn't help with answering the question.


The top five I can reasonably say have enough differentiation to defend as separate genres. However, the only other genre I know I listened to this year on Spotify was Blues (and Electric Blues) and possibly Modern Classical (John Zorn will mess things up)... I don't know how I can get to 141. Except, of course, if one divides the categories even finer... which is certainly something that Spotify is doing. And, I'm not sure that is something worth doing. Is there enough differentiation between Metal Core and Nu Metal or Hard Rock and Grunge or Death Metal and Death Core to parse these differences. Does Jazz similarly get subdivided in BeBop and Hard Bop and Swing? Is a higher number of genres actually a useful differentiator when the differences are so subtle? I do not know.

So... did the 2025 Wrapped List tell me anything useful? Not really. Babymetal was almost certainly my most listened to band this year (on Spotify and in real life). But, John Zorn was probably second in real life (just due to where my CD listening project is and that it has hit the Zs . But, it is something that people like to over-analyze so it is a perfect place to start a blog.

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