Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon and Instagrammable glory.

The annual release dominates social media posts for a day, but among the colorful cards (designed to be personalized but distributed en masse) is Spotify’s boast about the amount of data the company has collected about you, mirrored in a way that is meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.

In the final days of December, the tightening of our data expanded beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify’s main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay and is unveiling this year’s version on Tuesday. Starbucks has been sending out emails informing people of their favorite drinks and store visits, shocking some at exactly how many dozen Frappuccinos they purchased. Duolingo launched Wrapped Season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they’ve made when trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of their purchases from the last few years called “Unpacked”. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a “Year in Swipe” party, revealing the top trends in online dating that the app has discovered from its wide swath of 50 million monthly users. Add a hand emoji to its BIOS to indicate that they are looking for real connections.

This is all starting to get weird. The type of latte we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominate among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still attract a lot of attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year’s “Wrapped,” its market cap hit $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.

“People are so excited to see the data they have collected and then have it presented to them in a way that feels meaningful and understandable,” said Taylor Annabell, a researcher at Utrecht University who created the Wrapped investigated the phenomenon. “Wrapped is based on our belief that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves.”

Wrapped 2024 included the usual reveal of top songs and artists, but Spotify added a “Wrapped AI podcast” in which two voicebot hosts chat about your listening habits without really saying much about the songs in particular. There was also a section that examined how listening styles changed during different months of the year. For me, that meant going from “van life folkie indie” to “mallgoth permanent wave punk,” slightly embarrassing phrases that might remotely describe my musical tastes but tell me little new about myself.

Packaged content has proven so effective on social media that people are creating new categories themselves and packaging parts of their personal lives that aren’t captured by apps.

Of course, Spotify can’t capture everything about your tastes – maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. (“It’s not me who can’t stop listening to Chumbawamba. It’s my cousin, I swear!”) Maybe you’ve opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.

But where there is a lack of data, some have set out to create it themselves. Packaged content has proven so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to creating new categories, packaging parts of their lives not captured by apps, and sharing them with their followers. At least here, these people have the opportunity to curate their experiences and publish them at will. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk about how many first dates they had over the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to guide their users through the year of bad dates, situations, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen uses TikTok data and generates Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.

All of this is happening because people have largely given up and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have “made us not just accept that they are spying on us, but celebrate it,” said Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify, who released an album called “ “Spotify Is Surveillance” in 2021. “That’s the change we’re seeing with this end-of-year explosion of these kinds of viral gimmicks,” Greer added. “What they’re really trying to do is hyper-normalize the fact that the online services we use know so much about us.”

Tinder’s annual review examined data from U.S. and global profiles as well as its own survey results and identified the most popular love languages ​​and zodiac signs, as well as the fastest-growing words in bios (freak, pickleball and finance all surged this year). and how people like to communicate (ironically, “better in person” won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision board feature to help people set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company’s in-person “Year in Swipe” party was held at an atmospheric Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or attend a tarot card reading, and everyone had a button that matched their dating vibe, like one black cat or delusions. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of its use of the aggregated data.

But Spotify in particular wants to tell its users more about itself all year round. In September 2023, the company began creating “daily lists,” or curated playlists, that were published multiple times a day. While they don’t have the flashy, shareable cards you can post on Instagram, they do have memorable names that reveal something about you and change several times a day. Just this week, Spotify labeled me a “Laurel Canyon hippie” and set the mood for a “wistful Poetry Tuesday afternoon.”

The daily lists seem like Spotify’s attempt to take Wrapped’s success “to the next level,” said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked with Annabell on the Spotify research. It is “data fiction that accompanies people all day,” she said, adding: “What does it mean for them to constantly have this mirror held in their face?”

Most of us have come to terms with, or at least resigned ourselves to, Big Tech watching our every move. “Wrapped Season” is a glowing reminder of everything we seemingly did privately on our phones. But don’t expect your friends to stop sharing their top spot as Taylor Swift’s top 0.05% listener any time soon.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest technology companies and trends.

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