Am I my Spotify Wrapped? Spotify's algorithm makes me question its validity. | Opinion

Spotify's 600 million users are facing one of the streaming service’s most anticipated, yet dreaded, events: Spotify Wrapped. The annual user listening report provides each Spotify user with a compilation of data about their activity on the platform, commemorating users’ top songs, artists, albums and podcasts, with colorful graphics primed to be shared across social media.

Since its inception in 2016, Spotify Wrapped has seen major success mainly because of our cultural obsession with self-discovery and finding explanations for our behavior. It’s sort of like astrology for our ears. Was “The Tortured Poets Department” your most listened-to album this year? Let’s make that BetterHelp account! Were Addison Rae or Charli XCX your top artists? Let’s get off X and lower that screen time! Were you in the top 0.01% of Beyoncé listeners? What’s it like to have impeccable taste? Did you listen to hundreds of hours of ambient rain sounds to fall asleep? Maybe it’s time to invest in a white noise machine and a sleep study.

Besides the normal whiplash of seeing that one artist or song in your top five that you swore up and down you didn’t like, or the painful realization that your music taste contradicts the oeuvre of mystique and nicheness you’ve been trying so hard to build, Spotify’s current interface makes me side-eye my Wrapped a little bit and question how much of my listening patterns were through my own volition.

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Sabrina Carpenter's sixth studio album “Short N’ Sweet” was one of the most successful albums of this year, and its singles “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” were inescapable not just on the radio and social media, but also on streaming services. It seemed like no matter what song I would listen to, one of those three singles would always play right after.

I’m not the only one who's experienced this.

Other listeners experienced the same phenomenon with Kendrick Lamar’s No. 1 single “Not Like Us.” In another installment of their summerlong rap beef, Drake filed a petition accusing Universal Music Group and Spotify of using underhanded tactics to garner streams and manufacture success for “Not Like Us.” (Ironic for a man who spent all of 2018 on the cover of every Spotify playlist.)

There’s no proof that labels are in cahoots with Spotify and other streaming services to boost streams for their artists. But user experiences point to the fact that it very much could be happening. Some have likened it to payola, the illegal practice of paying a radio station to play a song without the station disclosing the payment.

The most payola-adjacent practice exhibited by Spotify (that we know of) is Discovery Mode, a marketing tool that allows artists and labels to get certain tracks into users’ personalized playlists, Spotify Radio, autoplay and Spotify Mixes.

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With so much exterior meddling in the Spotify algorithm, I’m forced to wonder if my listening habits are truly my own or if they’ve been thrust upon me by some suits in a boardroom or on a Teams call.

AI, algorithms create music echo chambers

Over the past couple of years, Spotify (like every other tech company) has unabashedly embraced artificial intelligence.

Early last year, Spotify introduced an AI-powered DJ to make the music listening experience more “interactive.” Initially, DJ would change genres every few songs for some variety and would go on little spiels in between these changes for a more “human” touch. But as I continued using it, I found that it just played the same or similar songs over and over.

In September of last year, Spotify launched “Daylists,” which the service described as algorithmically curated playlists, regularly updated to collect "the niche music and microgenres you usually listen to during particular moments in the day or on specific days of the week."

Daylists are most known for their kitschy, word salad-y titles that are, of course, AI-generated. At the time of writing this, my Daylist title is “mood music quiet storm Monday evening” ... whatever that means.

Spotify, through all the AI features it boasts, makes its hyper-personalization a major draw. But often, its user-specific algorithm can create echo chambers that feed and refeed the same artists, songs, genres and overall “vibes.” At what point does hyper-personalization become incredibly impersonal and detached?

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The Spotify homepage is exemplary of this. Most of the homepage is filled with recently played content. Scroll down and you’ll find algorithmic playlists filled with songs the app knows you like with a few new ones, that don’t deviate too far off from your established listening patterns, sprinkled in. Scroll down even more and you’ll find popular albums and album recommendations based on your recent user habits. Scroll even further and you’ll see podcasts and audiobooks even if you don’t engage with that type of content.

There have been countless times when I had a hankering to listen to something new and this homepage setup offered very little help. I’d rather Spotify take a swing and miss by offering up an album or artist outside of my comfort zone than continue to fill my feed with recommendations based on user data, AI and algorithms. These things just lull us into becoming passive listeners.

Like any other app, Spotify’s incentive is to keep us on the platform as long as possible. They do this by keeping us comfortable, almost to the point of mind-numbing redundancy. When our listening patterns are largely determined by algorithms, potential label tampering and the echo chambers they create, reports like Spotify Wrapped become less of a reflection of our own personal taste and more of a reflection of whatever Spotify allows in ear’s reach.

Kofi Mframa is a columnist and digital producer for USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Can you edit your Spotify Wrapped? AI has ruined playlists | Opinion