Anyone who has been near pop-culture internet in the last four years has undoubtedly observed and probably even participated in the annual late November Spotify Wrapped posting, lamenting, and shaming. Spotify Wrapped in an ingenious business move by the streaming service Spotify, arguably the most popular music app of our time. It is an aesthetically designed list released towards the end of each year, summarizing each user’s most listened to songs, albums, artists, etc. Starting in 2016, Spotify Wrapped has come a long way from just showing yearly listening statistics to becoming a cultural phenomenon, using unique features such as “music persona” and “which country does your music taste align with the most?” to grab the attention of users all over the world.
However, with the popularization of Spotify Wrapped, the discussion that is often glossed over is how Spotify is not only collecting, but also retaining this data for over a year. Past Wrapped playlists also live on in your Spotify account, implying that Spotify retains previous data as well, instead of discarding it.
AI & User Data : The Conglomerate Fantasy
It becomes obvious that companies such as Spotify have been using artificial intelligence models to collect and visualize data used in Spotify Wrapped. Using AI, Spotify is able to hyper-personalize the kind of experience each user has upon viewing their Wrapped, which creates brand pathos. The design is bright, colorful and maximalist, but is all of this simply a veil to hide the violation of user privacy on the part of the company?
There does exist a “private session” feature within the app’s settings, which would prevent the app from recording listening statistics, but a large percentage of the user base is unaware of it due to its covert nature. Thus Spotify’s breach is technically legal as there is an option to protect your data from the company, but they keep this information hidden and have never marketed the feature publicly.
Spotify, thus, manages to make AI data breach a social currency, whereas it appeals to human senses of “FOMO” and internet culture and trend. In a privacy program assessment, Spotify does not fare well in terms of user safety and data privacy, and receives a 63% user warning, as in, it violates 63% of user safety guidelines. No matter what our stance may be on other artificial intelligence tools such as Midjourney or ChatGPT, at the end of every year, without fail, we all collectively flock to our Spotify apps to attentively watch our data being handed over to us on an aesthetic platter.
However, it is not only Spotify which has managed to fool us into readily sharing our personal data with companies and third parties. In recent years, this AI tool, has gone viral and resurfaces among popular culture every few weeks - it is an AI “trained” to essentially judge and sarcastically comment on the user’s music listening habit once the user shares its music streaming service permissions with it. Having used it a couple of times, it is undeniably a good laugh.
However, it also requires you to hand over your Spotify or Apple Music permissions to it, after which it does not automatically unsync. To disconnect the AI from your music streaming service, you have to go to the music app settings and manually remove permissions, but until then it retains app permissions over your listening habits. This is only one of the few such apps. Interestingly, a large number of them are related to streaming service statistics and numbers.
Human Psyche and the AI Psyche
While many of us may be wary and apprehensive of using AI tools, or deem them immoral, companies such as Spotify seem to have cracked the code on how to even make the conservative of internet users share their data. It seems to be a fairly easy formula too, employing social vulnerability and bright graphics to trick even the most careful of their users.
It also helps that the language employed by most of these bots are sarcastic and humanlike, leading to an innate sense of trust even though we are intellectually aware that these are AI run software. Spotify recorded a whopping 20% increase in users after launching Spotify Wrapped - it feeds on what humans fear the most : not the robot takeover, but the fear of missing out.
Conclusion
AI is not going away anytime soon, nor will streaming services and their manipulative yet creative marketing methods. Humans will still crave social validation, even if it comes from a computer bot. There is no right answer to where we go forward from here on now, but the least that we can do is start clearing out cache, removing app permissions and being self-aware that the judgment passed on our character based on that one song we heard on repeat during a stressful time in our lives is created by a bunch of codes typed into a software. Spotify can make us look like the most culturally aware music listener if only we play our moves right. Thus, the only way to make our data more safe is to spend a few more minutes to find that “private session” button and take the first step ourselves.
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