Spotify Wrapped’s New “Listening Age” Feature Did Not Need to Read Us Quite So Hard

I don’t give Spotify a ton of credit for its annual Wrapped feature (the idea famously came from an intern!), but I have to admit that this year’s campaign is pretty fun—the “Listening Age” part, which estimates how old you are based on your music tastes, especially.

When I opened my Wrapped on Wednesday, I assumed my Listening Age would be somewhere near my actual age of 32, given my two most-played artists are Lorde (teen vibes) and the cast of the 2006 Broadway revival of Company (geriatric energy). In fact, this was not the case; Spotify deemed my Listening Age to be a whopping 51 years old, due largely to the fact that I apparently listen to a lot of music from the early ’90s. Sorry, but why am I being held accountable for the fact that riot grrrl rocks?

Curious about my colleagues’ listening habits, I dropped a query about everyone else’s Listening Age into the Vogue team Slack channel. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one Spotify had dramatically aged: “I’m 41, and my Spotify age is 53,” said Vogue Runway senior fashion news editor Laia Garcia-Furtado. This, she didn’t mind so much: “I’ve read before that 1984 is part of a micro-generation that’s, like, too young to be proper Gen X or too old to be proper millennial? Anyway, what I’m saying is this spiritually tracks.” Senior editor Marley Marius, who is 31, was hit with a Listening Age of 79. “My top artists are Barbra Streisand, Bach, Luther Vandross, Amy Winehouse, and Johnny Mathis,” she reported, “so…”

Not everyone at Vogue had a Listening Age that skewed old-school, however. “I was embarrassingly overjoyed to learn that my Spotify age was 29—and, yes, mystified, given that for me this was, largely, the Year of Oasis (and given that I’m, let’s say, somewhere north of 50),” senior editor Corey Seymour told me. “My glee quickly turned to a sigh when I saw that the music tastes of my 13-year-old daughter, Esme, were reflected on my Wrapped (she has her own Spotify account and I’d assumed this would be the first year in a long while that wouldn’t have, say, Melanie Martinez, or whatever this year’s version of My Little Pony is, on it). Alas! Word quickly spread through our family text thread like wildfire that Esme’s age was 36 (but why? her Laufey-heavy playlists? Chappell?), leaving me as the, ahem, baby of our family. Small victories!”

“When I was 17, all I listened to was Bob Dylan. I was so in love with him, in fact, that my dad and I followed him on a casino tour through South America for my senior spring break while all my peers were drinking and French kissing in Mexico,” said senior beauty and wellness editor Margaux Anbouba. “Today, Spotify told me that I have the music taste of a 17-year-old (Doechii and Tate McCray were big on my top-played list). I am 35, so I don’t know if I’m aging in reverse, or just my music tastes are.”