Can Spotify and Lloyds and Uber and Deliveroo and Apple and everyone stop wrapping my year, please! |
From Spotify to banking, data ‘wraps’ are taking over the festive period and exposing all our bad habits. Anna Moloney wants out
The rise of wrapification and why you can keep my data, please
In the year 2025, it feels like Spotify Wrapped has reached the status of full Christmas tradition, akin to stockings over the fireplace and the baby Lord Jesus in the manger himself.
The annual ritual – in which the music streaming service stores up our listening data for the year only to dump it back at our feet at the end of it – generated 200m engaged users within just 24 hours this year, up 19 per cent on 2024. At City AM HQ, certainly not short of data obsessives, there was practically a frenzy as everyone rushed to download their own and flaunt their taste to the rest of the newsroom (though not so much myself with a listening age of 65 and top artists of Taylor Swift and ABBA).
But this year it’s not just Spotify, with a whole cavalry of brand data ‘wraps’ nonconsensually charging towards us: Strava, Deliveroo, Youtube, Apple photos, even Tesco Clubcard – you can barely open an app in December without corporatopia holding up, as ‘twere, the mirror to nature, whether that involves graphs detailing hundreds of al desko meal deals or........