Spotify Wrapped: How to Get the Music Streaming Service's Annual Countdown

It’s that time of year again. Spotify took the wraps off this year’s “Spotify Wrapped” tool this week, the website that calculates your musical choices of the past year to give you a custom rundown of your listening habits.

The tool looks at the viewing habits of listeners for the last 12 months and provides them with some fun facts. Perhaps you tend to listen to artists with a Gemini star sign, or you have a high percentage of non-mainstream artists in your played list. You can also take a trip back to the start of the year to find out your first played song. There’s even a quiz to see how many minutes you spent listening to music this year. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent tool for Apple Music at the time of writing.

Spotify announced the new version of the tool on Tuesday for a Thursday launch, and it’s proven a big hit on social media. A post with over 6,000 upvotes on the “HipHopHeads” subreddit saw people sharing a plethora of stats, with people sharing that their top artist was Kanye West, most played song was “Ric Flair Drip,” and that their first played song was Despacito. A post requesting a similar tool for Apple Music has over 600 upvotes on Reddit.

It’s been a big year for Spotify, as it reached 83 million paid subscribers in July. It was also the year when Ariana Grande won most-listened female artist with over three billion listeners, while Drake scored the accolade of most-streamed artist with 8.2 billion plays. It was also the year that “emo rap” became the service’s rising genre, while “Africa” by Toto became the top throwback song. Spotify also continued its move into podcasts, with crime and mystery ranking at number one.

This year, the service is also offering artists the option to drill down into their listeners’ habits. Spotify has also compiled a top tracks list of 2018 for those eager to listen to some of the year’s big hits:

It may throw up some odd suggestions. When Inverse tried the tool, it showered praise for “some super solid choices” while listing Granular’s album of white noise as a favorite song of 2018. The website is flattering, but a collection of sounds that many people use to fall asleep probably won’t make many New Year’s Eve playlists:

Spotify Wrapped: How to Use

Getting acquainted with Spotify Wrapped is easy.

• Visit this website.
• Touch or click the “Connect with Spotify” button. There’s another option to join Spotify, but the tool is rather useless with a new account.
• Either log in with Facebook or enter your Spotify login details. Again, Spotify will ask if you want to join.
• Confirm you want to connect “2018 Wrapped” to your Spotify account. There’s also the option to switch accounts if the wrong user is showing. European users may see a message that their data may be transferred outside of the European Economic Area.
• Wait a second for the rundown to load.
• Enjoy! Scroll through to see the rest of your year and see what Spotify came up with. The website offers parallax effects on supported devices: tilt your phone or move your mouse to make the onscreen elements move around like a faux-3D image.

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