Everyone posts their Spotify Wrapped like it’s a personality test.
“Look at me, I’m a sad indie kid with a side of 2000s pop-punk nostalgia.”
Cool. Except that’s not who you are, it’s just what you had on repeat when you were cleaning the kitchen.

Spotify Wrapped isn’t truth. It’s a highlight reel built for Instagram stories. It doesn’t tell you about the song that wrecked you at 2 a.m. Or the track you couldn’t skip because it felt like a lifeline. It doesn’t know you listened to that cheesy love ballad 15 times and then deleted it so nobody would see it on your history.

What Spotify Wrapped says about you is… nothing. What it hides about you is everything.

Music is marrow, not metrics

For me, music has always been the thread that holds the fabric of my life together. Not every song—most are background noise. But when the right one finds me, it cuts straight to the core. There are anthems for joy, love, fear, regret, anger. There are songs that remind me who I was, and others that make me want to be someone different.

Even now, older, heavier with years, I can hear a chord progression or a lyric and feel the floor shift under me. Music still wrecks me. Music still saves me.

That’s not data. That’s blood and bone.

Wrapped is marketing theatre

Spotify Wrapped was never built for you. It was built for Spotify. It’s a clever marketing campaign disguised as self-discovery. Your “top artists” aren’t a mirror, they’re a product placement. Your playlists aren’t intimate confessions, they’re engagement metrics.

And we eat it up, because we want to believe our listening habits mean something. That if we’re in the top 1% of Taylor Swift fans, we must be loyal. Or that if we stream obscure Icelandic techno, we must be interesting. Wrapped packages our vanity, feeds it back to us, and watches us post it for free advertising.

But the songs that defined your year? They’re not on the chart. They’re the ones that never make it to social media because they’re too private, too raw, too tangled up in who you really are.

The songs you won’t admit to

If you want to know someone, don’t look at their Wrapped. Ask them this instead:

• What song do you love that you’d never admit at a party?
• Which track made you cry in the car this year?
• What’s the one you skip because it reminds you of someone you lost?

Those are the answers that matter. That’s where identity lives, in the shadows, not the spotlight.

The truth your data can’t tell

Spotify can count your streams. It can’t count the lump in your throat.
It can tally minutes listened. It can’t measure the way one lyric clung to you for days.
It can calculate your “audio aura.” It can’t calculate how music becomes memory, grief, joy, and love.

Spotify Wrapped is entertainment. Fine. But don’t mistake it for truth. Truth is messier, more human, and completely unshareable.

So go ahead and post your Wrapped if you want. But the real story, the one that matters, is the playlist you’d never show anyone. That’s who you are.

I’ll go first. Below is my playlist (Spotify and Apple Music). Some are hits, some are bangers, but every one means something important to me. They helped me heal, they carried me through rough days, and they opened my eyes when I needed them.

Now it’s your turn. Share the playlist you never thought you’d share.