The time has come.

Spotify Wrapped is the music streamer’s favorite holiday—it wraps up all of their streaming stats and data in a nice little in-app slideshow, complete with most-streamed songs and cool graphics. Wrapped counts your data from January 1 to around the end of October, and is released each November. Let’s dive into some of the stats for 2023 and features that set this Wrapped apart.

Favorite Genre

Wrapped begins with the user’s most-streamed genre. Mandopop, Mexican music, Afrobeats, and Indian classical music all saw massive increases in listening across the world. However, Gen-Z is notably undefined and unbound by genre. We tend to listen regardless of genre, and hardly pay attention to it. Instead, Gen-Z tends to listen by mood.

Favorite Songs

Globally, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” was the most-streamed song of 2023, with 1.6 billion streams. It was followed by SZA’s “Kill Bill,” and Harry Styles’s “As It Was.”

Favorite Artists

As you could probably guess, Taylor Swift reigns as the Top Spotify Artist this year, with 26.1 billion streams globally since January 1st, 2023. In fact, leading up to the reveal of Wrapped 2023, Spotify released billboards across the world with Easter eggs hinting toward Swift’s achievement. Her famous symbols, like snakes and red lips, were on the billboards.

Spotify also said that for a limited time, listening to a Taylor Swift song on Spotify will result in the progress bar changing colors to match whichever “era” of Taylor Swift’s discography that it was released in.

Listening Timelines

A new feature that Spotify unveiled this year was listening timelines, which take your top 5 artists of the year and lay out how often you listened to them according to the month. It also let you know during which month you listened to them most.

Sound Town

Personally, the most fun feature that Spotify added this year was the Sound Town. Spotify takes your listening habits and connects them to a place in the world that has similar listening habits. Mine was Limassol, Cyprus, due to all the time I spent listening to Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Alkistis Protopsalti, and Dimitra Galani.

Trends

This year’s Wrapped saw some interesting trends shift the overall stats. Things like movie releases, memes, and TikTok trends heavily influenced some of the playlists made and songs listened to.

Me in 2023

Finally, Spotify continued the “listening personality” feature, which is called Me in 2023. Based on your habits, Spotify assigns listeners to a personality. I was the Alchemist, because I never stopped creating and curating playlists. Other personalities include the Shapeshifter, who binge-listens to one artist and then repeats the process with someone else; and the Vampire, who listens to emotional music at night.

See Yours

If you use Spotify, you can access your Spotify Wrapped in the app (make sure it’s updated) or at spotify.com/Wrapped. For those of you who share an account, or leave on ambient music to sleep, or accidentally left a song on loop for hours this year… let’s hope your Wrapped isn’t too rigged.

This has been a mini-installment of Sound Check with Jules, the new musical column in the Hatters’ Herald. Tune in weekly to hear about music history, review, recommendations, analysis, culture, and more! This week’s full installment will be published tomorrow.