The holidays are right around the corner. While for some people that means looking forward to wrapping gifts, for music lovers, that means looking forward to Spotify Wrapped. Spotify Wrapped is due to arrive on either November 30 or December 1 (it has landed on both) after the app has collected users’ listening data for the prior 12 months (it’s still unclear where the cutoff is). You can see your Wrapped by just opening the app on your phone once the year’s campaign has launched. But you might be wondering how exactly Spotify Wrapped works after all this time. So…
How Does Spotify Wrapped Work?
Billboard looked into it, and the results are… inconclusive. While top five artists, top five songs, and top five albums — the “big three” Wrapped statistics — are based on total number of streams (over thirty seconds), without knowing the exact cutoff, it’s somewhat unclear which songs receive the most priority in individuals’ Wrapped results.
Billboard also noted that album length has apparently played a part in prior years’ top albums’ success, with longer works like Drake‘s Certified Lover Boy performing better and placing higher in the collective results (CLB was No. 4 on Spotify’s global year-end artist list). However, although offline listens do get counted (somehow), music listened to in Private Sessions doesn’t count toward any top five lists, individual or overall. They do count toward the “total minutes listened” number, just not broken down by genre/artist.