In a year when the world has dug deeper into music to endure the COVID-19 quarantine, streaming giant Spotify released 'Wrapped 2020' this week—a round up of its most popular songs, artists and personalised favourties, which kept listeners on psychological life support for the better part of an extraordinarily uncertain year. Wildly popular for its impressive catalog of songs, the publicly traded Swedish company is considered the mainstay of music streaming today.
Globally, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny snagged the top spot for artist with more than 8.3 billion streams with his February release YHLQMDLG, the number-one streamed album. Top most-streamed female artists include Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa and Halsey, in that order. The most-streamed song of the year is The Weekend’s 'Blinding Lights' with 1.6 billion streams.
India’s most-streamed artists on Spotify this year are Arijit Singh, Tanishk Bagchi, and Neha Kakkar. They are followed by K-pop boy band BTS, and then, Pritam. BTS is the only international act to feature in the top 5 artists on Spotify in India in 2020, a nod to the popularity of K-pop in the country. The top 5 most-streamed female artists include Neha Kakkar, Shreya Ghoshal, Asees Kaur, Tulsi Kumar, and Dhvani Bhanushali. The most-streamed songs include “Shayad” by Arijit Singh, Pritam and Irshad Kamil; “Falling” by Trevor Daniel; “Ghungroo (From War)” by Arijit Singh, Shilpa Rao, Kumaar, and Vishal-Shekhar.
Spotify's annual 'Wrapped', tool which allows users to revisit their listening history with a breakdown of artists discovered and songs played on loop, found extensive social media mentions since its release on December 2. Twitter was abuzz with screenshots of 'Wrapped' results as a projection of users' musical identity born out of their isolatory experience.
Tracking of listeners habits on Spotify is a meticulous affair, with deep dives on where one can follow one's top song's journey through the year from the first stream to its 100th stream to "songs that you listened to this year in one convenient place". In 2018, a story went around that The Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane claimed that Spotify’s data, combined with novel analytic techniques, is being adopted by researchers to study people’s mindset." Hinting at data privacy concerns, an Atlantic article pointed out how "Spotify Wrapped is a masterful coup of free advertising and an impressive display of consumer trust at a moment when our faith in tech companies is historically low. After all, to assemble your end-of-year hits playlist, the platform requires detailed information about everything you do and everything you hear when you use a platform many of us spend more time inside than any other."
But there's little denying SpotifyWrapped's emotional appeal this year for its millions of listeners.
