How old is your music taste? Spotify will tell you, but you may not like the answer

There's how old you are, and there's how old Spotify thinks you are.

That divide became clear this week with the release of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform's personalized year-end recap.

It walks listeners through their top artists, albums, genres and more in a self-reflective (and occasionally mortifying) interactive slideshow, based on data and delivered with sass. The decade-old tradition varies slightly in its aesthetics and substance every year, and this edition seems to have caught a lot of users off guard by bluntly informing them of their "listening age."

"Age is just a number, so don't take this personally," reads one of the slides, before proceeding to alternately humble, amuse and confuse.

Charli XCX, the 30-something electro-pop artist who invented "Brat," is spiritually 75, Spotify declared, because she listens to music from the late 1960s. The genre-defying, synth-savvy Grimes has a listening age of 92, while introspective singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams clocks in at 14, nearly half her real age. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, when asked by a reporter, revealed his comparatively youthful 44.

It's not just celebrities. Within hours of Wrapped dropping, social media was ablaze with screenshots and memes from listeners mostly either bragging or baffled about their listening age — particularly those many decades younger or older than their actual age. Jokes about "listening age gap relationship[s]," dinosaurs and psychiatric evaluations ensued.

It has become the norm for people to repost their top-five lists and listening-time tallies on social media — both giving Spotify free publicity and presenting a piece of themselves to their network. That was especially true in 2023, when Spotify assigned listeners to "Sound Towns," relegating them to places like Burlington, Vt., and Jakarta, Indonesia.

"[Spotify Wrapped] is a way by which we're able to project our identity based upon our cultural consumption," says Marcus Collins, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business (and an R&B fan with a listening age of 40, a few years younger than his real age).

Listening age, for better or worse, is another way to do that.

"It creates another identity project force, another … shock to the system for us to talk about," says Collins, who previously worked on iTunes initiatives at Apple and ran digital strategy for Beyoncé. "If you're 20 and your listening age is 70, what does that say about you?"

OK, so how did Spotify calculate this? 

Spotify did not respond to NPR's request for comment at the time of publication. But on a webpage explaining its process, the company says listening age is based on the idea of a "reminiscence bump," which it describes as the tendency for people to feel most connected to music from their youth.

Research shows that adults' brains especially hold onto memories from their teenage years, both generally and when it comes to music. One 2013 study, for example, found that young adults had strong positive memories of the music that their parents — and even grandparents — loved when they were that age.

"There's this idea that there are life stages … where we are receptive and open to new music, where music sort of shapes the experiences that we have, and as we get past those years, we kind of stay … in that moment in time," Collins says.

Spotify says it combs through a listener's songs to identify the "five-year span of music that you engaged with more than other listeners your age." It hypothesizes that this five-year window matches a listener's "reminiscence bump," assuming they were between 16 and 21 when those songs came out.

"For example, if you listen to way more music from the late 1970s than others your age, we playfully hypothesize that your 'listening' age is 63 today, the age of someone who would have been in their formative years in the late 1970s," it explains.

Collins says this approach not only plays into our sense of nostalgia but also helps "carve out where we sit in the timeline of our … social world." Our listening age tells us more about ourselves and gives us something new to talk about with our friends, especially if it's extreme or unexpected.

"We don't talk about things that are just boring — we talk about the things that are unbelievable," Collins says. "It gets our attention but also sparks this part of us that makes us want to engage."

What's the catch? 

Isn't this just a ploy by Spotify to get people listening and reposting? Is it turning our shock into free publicity? Are we being — the 2025 Oxford Word of the Year — rage baited?

Those are fair questions to ask, Collins says.

"What one may see as a productive way by which people can engage with people, one may also see it as a manipulative way of getting people to engage in consumption," he says. "The truth of the matter is, it's both of them at the same time."

Collins says it's a win-win situation because "the best marketing on the planet is us." Spotify is trying to get business for its platform, he says, but also helping people connect — which in turn helps it even more.

Collins says that he, like most people, learns that Spotify Wrapped is live from friends posting theirs on social media, rather than TV or online advertisements. That in turn makes him want to see and share his stats, "not because I love Spotify so much but because I want to participate in the social practices of my people."

"The best advertising isn't advertising — it's cultural production," he adds.

For its part, Spotify says that each of its slides is "made to be accurate, fair and reflective, while still keeping a sense of mystery and magic."

It's that mystery that some of us may find slightly maddening. Personally? As a fan of '70s music, I was pretty content with my listening age of 70 — until my much younger, cooler sister told me hers: 73.

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