This past Wednesday, the halls of SHS were full of students glued to their phone screens, holding their breath as they swiped through pages of statistics and compared their long-awaited results with friends. Students were excited to finally explore their personalized profiles on Spotify Wrapped, the music platform’s yearly summary of users’ preferences and listening data.
Over the next few days, results poured in to the Talon’s SHS Wrapped survey, providing a few key insights into students’ listening habits. Interested to hear where your Wrapped results fit in among your peers? The answers that students gave on the five survey questions might surprise you.
1. Music Artists
What stood out most about these responses was their variety. Out of nearly a hundred students who responded, most had different top artists, covering genres from pop country to classic rock to rap.
However, there were a few repeat responses. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Taylor Swift was the most popular singer, accounting for nearly ten percent of responses. Next in line was Drake, with five responses, followed by Mitski and Tyler the Creator with three each.
2. Songs
SHS’s top songs were even more varied: out of 83 different tracks, only three were reported more than once.
One of these, also the #1 2024 Spotify track in the United States, was the hit single “Espresso” from Sabrina Carpenter’s album Short n’ Sweet.
Next was Vampire Weekend’s “Capricorn,” a popular alt rock song released in February as a single to the group’s fifth album Only God Was Above Us.
Finally, a recent release from October made it into SHS’s top three, and it’s a song we all know and love: KSI’s “Thick of It.” That’s right, the viral meme song was—allegedly—two students’ most listened-to track of the year. Although the Talon has no way to confirm the anonymous survey data, “Thick of It” has certainly become as much of a sensation at Sharon High School as it is on the Internet.
3. Listening Time
The Talon’s survey sorted students into six different listening brackets, from 0 minutes of music listening to 50,000 or more. In retrospect, that bar could have been set much higher—almost a third of respondents reported more than 50K minutes, with an average in the 30,000-40,000 bracket. That’s a solid three weeks of listening! Who knew Sharon students were such dedicated music aficionados? Certainly not teachers, who must be exhausted at this point of telling students to take their AirPods out during class…
4. Ratings
We’ve got the facts down, but what opinions did students have about this year’s Wrapped? It turns out that the average rating was about 6.8 out of ten. Twelve students gave the experience a full ten out of ten, while only two students rated it one out of ten. But to learn why these students responded the way they did, we’ll need to take a look at the final question of the survey.
5. Comments & Concerns
Thirty-two students opted to share their thoughts on Wrapped 2024 with the Talon. A majority of their opinions were negative, with several students describing it as “boring” and a “downgrade” from previous years. In particular, many disliked the “phases” intended to describe trends in a user’s music taste during specific months. One student observed that the names of the phases (such as ‘Pink Pilates Princess Roller Skating Pop’) “sounded like a Peardeck code.”
However, it’s important to keep in mind that response bias can lead people to overstate their negative feelings—see an interesting study on this here. A few students did chime in with more positive views: “It was amazing and looked so good this year,” wrote one respondent, and another noted that they liked the month-to-month progression feature.
Some students shared perspectives on Wrapped that dove deeper than their own experiences. Several objected to Spotify’s heavy use of AI to analyze and present user data. One respondent criticized Wrapped as a marketing tool, explaining that “most people don’t realize how much data Spotify is collecting from them.” Finally, another student, although they rated this year’s Wrapped 8/10, claimed that “Apple Music Replay is better!”
Interestingly, students also raised concerns about the accuracy of their data, claiming that their top artists and songs were “wrong” or didn’t fully represent their music taste, although it’s unclear why this would be the case. Recently, inaccuracy seems to be a common complaint about Spotify’s data and user recommendations, joining older concerns about the platform’s biased algorithms and artist compensation. According to Spotify, its personalized recommendations are “a mix of giving you what you like while pushing you outside your comfort zone, too” (see this article).
Want to learn more about SHS students’ favorite music? Check out the Talon on Spotify! This playlist combines every top song reported to the Talon’s survey, featuring popular artists like Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, and The Weeknd.
