Scrolling through your Instagram stories in early December, you were probably bombarded with screenshots of “Spotify Wrapped” or “Apple Music Replay” stats.
Sharing your musical tastes is nothing new. Music lovers have always shared their discoveries: first by lending their vinyls, then by creating mixtapes, before more recently establishing playlists. The music you listen to partly reflects your personality. And by sharing your preferences, you share an important part of your identity.
But describing his musical tastes can be difficult, because they are as complex as we are. Most of the time, a single genre, a single artist or a single album is not enough to accurately represent everything we listen to. This is why summaries of music streaming platforms play an essential role.
When our data speaks about us
Whether it’s Spotify Wrapped, Apple Music Replay, or their less popular cousin, YouTube Music Recap, Year-End Recaps leverage data acquired over the past year to give you a comprehensive report of what you’ve listened to over that time. .
Most importantly, these summaries present data in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing and easy to share. With a simple screenshot, you can show everyone your five favorite artists or tracks. A publication more representative of your musical universe than if you had to explain it with words.
In addition to learning more about others, you can also learn more about yourself. The songs all express a specific emotion that the artist tries to convey: heartache, anxiety, mourning, happiness… and many others.
The ability to get to know yourself better by quantifying yourself in tangible numbers is fascinating (and people are addicted to it). It is for this reason that year-end reviews have grown far beyond the music industry.
A practice extended to leisure
Last year, Hulu launched a Year-End Video Streaming Recap, which showed your viewing trends while you were using the service.
Duolingo, the language-learning app, and Strava, the fitness tracker, also released year-end stats for users. For both of these apps, statistics can help users understand how well they’ve worked toward their personal goals over the past year. They can also help them understand what they need to do next year to get closer to their goals.
And that’s not all: Snapchat publishes a “year-end story” that presents a summary of your Snapchat memories for the entire year. Instagram followed Snapchat’s lead and launched the Instagram Playback feature last year, which also aggregates user stories into one big year-end recap.
It is both nostalgic and enlightening to see the activity of the past year through these recap services. But for the reports to accurately reflect your life over the past year, the app would need to document every instance of your activity. So what about your life beyond apps?
If you had a great run that made you feel good, but forgot to save it to Strava, does that mean the workout didn’t happen? How about those times you heard a new song on a summer afternoon breeze – doesn’t that mean anything? And that amazing date at the cafe, which you didn’t take a picture of because you were having too much fun, and which will never be one of your best moments?
Exit statistics
These services can indeed give a good overview of our statistics for specific activities, but the numbers are ultimately limited to what the app is able to track. And these are not all aspects of your daily life.
You can therefore decide to document your daily life more, so that these services are increasingly representative. But you will become more and more dependent on the medium that allows you to document your daily life. The risk ? Forgetting to enjoy the moment.
There’s another, probably more practical solution: take a step back and laugh at those year-end recaps. This does not mean that they are meaningless. They have value, are a fun way to share passions with friends, and can provide personal insight. But remember that they never show the whole table.
Source: ZDNet.com