Like pictures capture the highs or lows of our past, evoke emotions, trigger memories, and package the essence of our mindset in a given time, this year’s Spotify Wrapped has done the same. As 2020 has been a year filled with uncertainty, stress, and constant change, music has served as a relief for many people. Spotify’s 2020 Wrapped statistics capture the ability music has to distract, heal, express our emotions, and help us cope. It allows users to reflect upon and revisit memories of the previous year.
Spotify Wrapped is a fun way to look at the evolution of your music taste and serves as a way to look back and connect to your emotions and growth throughout the year. In such an eventful and emotionally draining year, there was no better way to gauge a students’ 2020 experience than through their music. As our generation has music readily available at our fingertips and on replay throughout our daily lives, what did Blake students’ Spotify Wrapped say about their 2020 experience?
Having music attached to experiences makes it easier for the brain to return to those moments when listening again. For example, Lorna Kreusel ‘21 describes 2020 as “Kind of awful.” She describes how music comforts her and serves as a memory marker, stating, “It definitely helped with my emotions, now I’m just very emotionally attached to a lot of albums.” In reflecting on the song that she listened to most this year, “Normal Girl” by SZA, Kreusel describes the transformative ability of the song, stating, “I found that song in July … I’ll go back and listen to it, and it brings you back to how you felt when you first heard it, and there’s so many memories now that I have with all these songs and artists and that’s really cool.”
When asked about the role that music played in her 2020 experience, Evie Doran ‘23 reflects on the comfort that it provided during her quarantine, stating that, “Music has just been a big deal to me this year, especially finding new music and [finding] music that reflects how I feel. I have a lot of emotions about COVID-19 and quarantine, and trying to put them into words is difficult, but somehow songs do that better than when I try to put it [those emotions] into words.”
Upon receiving statistics of minutes spent listening, both Doran and Kreusel saw an incline in time spent listening as we all have more time at home this year. Doran explains, “I just had music going on in the background of everything.” Similarly, Kreusel notes a significant jump in listening time from her last year, which was around 85,000 minutes. Her total for this year came to a whopping 122,509 minutes. Kreusel comments further, proclaiming herself a music enthusiast, “When I tell you I don’t do anything other than listen to music, I’m not kidding, it’s all I do.” In response to her impressive listening time, Kreusel reflects, “It makes sense, in 2020 it makes sense, I was at my house for half of the year, so that makes sense to me.”
Throughout the year, I also found myself listening to more music more than I previously ever had in a year. In 2020 I listened to approximately 45,681 minutes of music, which is a little over 31 days straight spent listening. This year I rediscovered music and its abilities. I had the time to indulge in music; I spent time finding new music, creating playlists, passing the time, and escaping my emotions of boredom and apprehension, if only temporarily. So, despite this year being one of the most difficult on record, thank you to Spotify for letting us know we’re almost at the finish line and for helping us escape reality, if only for a little while.
