Wrapped remains the only annual event where people brag about sounding older than their parents.Spotify Wrapped arrived on 3 December, and, as always, the internet posted its results faster than most people reply to their parents. But this year, one new metric stole the show: Your Listening Age, Spotify’s attempt to pin down what era your taste belongs to. It’s absurd, a little accurate, a little insulting, and instantly the most meme-able thing Wrapped has done in years. Wrapped itself has become a seasonal ritual, now ten years old, pulling almost a full year of listening history from January to mid-November. Spotify describes it as a snapshot of your actual habits, not your aspirational ones. In their own words: “Wrapped captures your 2025 listening journey… Listening in Private Mode and utilising features like Exclude from Taste Profile count toward your total time spent with Spotify, but they don’t shape your taste-based stories… We also filter out background sounds like white noise, so your Wrapped reflects the real soundtrack of your year.” Which is a polite way of saying: yes, Spotify saw the embarrassing stuff, but no, they didn’t judge you for it. The new “age” feature works off a simple idea: people often feel most emotionally tied to the music they heard between sixteen and twenty-one, a period psychologists call the reminiscence bump. Spotify looks at the release years of what you played in 2025, finds the five-year era you kept returning to, and uses that to guess your “listening age.” The youngest possible age is 16; the oldest is 100. That should have been clear enough, and then, predictably, the internet arrived.People began posting screenshots, in the exact Wrapped template, claiming their listening age was 468 because they “only listened to late Renaissance bops,” or 2000 because they “spent the year deep in Mongolian throat singing from 25 AD.” Another favourite: “Since you were into Gregorian chants from the late eighth century, your taste goes beyond antiquity.” Completely impossible, of course, but Wrapped has always been as much performance as it is data. A curious hierarchy formed almost immediately. A high listening age became a badge of taste: older meant deeper, more soulful, more cultured, the sign of someone who “really listens.”A low one? “Basic, mainstream, algorithm-poisoned.”Everyone pretending to complain about being 87 is actually showing off. Wrapped remains the only annual event where people brag about sounding older than their parents. Meanwhile Spotify said this was their biggest launch yet, with over 200 million users engaging within the first 24 hours, partly because Wrapped is now a cultural ritual, and partly because its numbers are absurd enough to fuel a week-long meme fest
