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Reference

Annabell, T., & Rasmussen, N. V. (2025). An algorithmic event: The celebration and critique of Spotify Wrapped. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251391301

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Welcome into the podcast, Revise and Resubmit 🎙️✨

Today, we are diving into an algorithmic ritual you probably screenshotted, shared, and maybe even side–eyed a little: Spotify Wrapped.
Every December, your listening history turns into a colourful confession: top artists, guilty-pleasure tracks, and that one song you played at 2 AM a few too many times. Wrapped looks like a party, feels like a personality quiz, and behaves like a data-hungry machine. 🎧📊

In the article “An algorithmic event: The celebration and critique of Spotify Wrapped”, published on November 24, 2025 in the prestigious Scopus Q1 journal New Media & Society (SAGE Publications) 🏛️, scholars Taylor Annabell and Nina Vindum Rasmussen peel back the neon gradients and show us the machinery behind the magic.

They call Wrapped an “algorithmic event”: a moment when millions of users stop, look at their data, and ask, “Is this really me?”
Through five creative workshops with university students, they explore “wrappification” – that slick process where data extraction is rebranded as fun, identity, and memory work. 🎭

From their analysis, four themes emerge like tracks on a playlist:

• 🎵 The resonance of Wrapped – why this recap hits so emotionally.

• 🧍‍♀️ The limits of the Wrapped self – how your “data self” both mirrors and distorts who you are.

• 🌫️ The ambience of music – where mood, place, and bodies escape neat categories.

• 🏗️ Contestations of Spotify’s governance – the quiet ways users push back against platform power.

Participants celebrate personalization, yet they also see the strings: classification systems that flatten messy lives, commercial logics that turn intimacy into metrics, and strategic listening where people game the system just to get a cooler Wrapped. Still, their relationship with music often overflows the app, reminding us that songs carry memories, atmospheres, and affect that no chart can fully pin down. 💿💚

So today on Revise and Resubmit, we’ll sit with this tension: the joy of being seen by an algorithm, and the discomfort of being sorted, sold, and surveilled by it. We’ll ask what it means when a platform tells you who you’ve been all year, and why that story feels both seductively right and stubbornly incomplete.

🙏 A big thank you to Taylor Annabell, Nina Vindum Rasmussen, and the team at New Media & Society (Scopus Q1, SAGE Publications) for this thought-provoking work and for letting us think with their research today.

If you enjoy deep dives like this, don’t forget to subscribe to “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, and Apple Podcasts 🎧, and check out our YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” for