The music streaming service, that I stream music from, knows which music I streamed. I’m shocked.
The problem is when that streaming service also tells all its company friends what music you streamed, which helps them profile you even more accurately.
I listed to marina and the diamonds and tool. Maybe they could pitch me better headphones? I am actually in the market for new headphones.
What are they going to do, black mail me by telling my friends I listen to Taylor Swift occasionally?
No, but the more they know about you, the surer they can be that different groups of data belong to the same person. Since music taste is quite personal, it helps quite a lot in constructing a profile. And I sure hope you do understand that it isn’t ideal that tech giants know everything about you.
They have my payment information. They don’t need to guess.
Yes, but you also won’t give them your payment information every time you use the internet, or on every device, so often it might just as well be someone else on your IP address.
I am normally really protective with my data but I don’t get the outrage here. If the data is all about how you use the app and the report relates to things relevant to usage that are interesting and is sent just to you,I don’t see the harm. It’s not broadcast to the world and isn’t sharing a bunch of sensitive information (as far as I know). It just seems like a fun way to reflect on the year.
I use Pandora and I wish they did something like this. As much as pandora is all about data I would love to see a report on my music listening with some of their insights about music attributes included.
You may want to look into last.fm, I see It supports Pandora too.
It does a better job than Spotify imo
It also shows you users with similar music tastes. There’s this one guy I found in 2015/2016. Every time I look for new music, I just peruse his recently played and always leave happy. Never messaged him. I don’t even think he (or she) speaks English.
Spotify has to collect data on what you listen to to recommend music that’s similar. I’d argue that’s Spotify’s best feature.
My friends and I enjoy sharing our results with each other every year. IMO the problem arises when results are shared with advertisers or without my knowledge.
Yeah, on its own this is a good feature and I don’t have to write my own version based on the GDPR data request.
I like spotify wrapped. I could easily pirate music, but I have premium for music discovery and it’s cool to see what I’ve been listening to this year and compare with previous years.
Spotify is the only service I pay for. Quite happy with it.
And apparently I listen to FAR more John Denver than I ever would have guessed. My teenage punker self would smack me.
Lmso, spotify is nice becouse 99% of artists are there but the artists dont get psid well apparently, personaløy I use it cuz its easy and convenient.
Also my wrapped just cuz principle:
This article should actually be about hack journalism that uses hot button issues to make clicks out of pointless nonsense.
Why wouldn’t they keep track of what you listen to even without wrapped? It’s just standard telemetry. They need to keep track of plays to pay artists accordingly, and they keep track of what you listen to specifically so they can give you recommendations. How would you think recommendations would work without some kind of tracking?
Also what’s scary about knowing what you listened to? Heck me and my significant other guess each others top song and artist and we’re always close even though we don’t hear everything each of us listen to. And what nefarious purposes is Spotify usage going to be used for that makes it so scary?
The second part of the headline is misleading, while true, the author gives just a cursory glance to privacy.
Statements like this make people take privacy less seriously. I don’t see how a music streaming site could possibly function without at least indirectly collecting the information displayed in the wrap up.
This year I noticed that it didn’t really reflect my tastes. A couple of the most played songs were songs I don’t actually like, that Spotify keeps playing me in the car. I can’t tell it I don’t like the song while I’m driving, and even if I skip it, the song just reappears the next day.
So my New Year’s music resolution is to rely on generated streaming playlists less and be more deliberate about what I listen to. Evidently I’m spending a lot of time tolerating music I don’t particularly enjoy.
Yeah I spent a lot of time with “daily mix” playlists playing. Half of the songs were ones they kept repeating in those.
i checked my stats.fm top 2023 artists vs wrapped, and i’m seeing the same inaccuracies that you mention. my wrapped artists were:
- Artist A
- Artist B
- Artist C
- Artist D
- Artist E (not on top 5 on stats.fm)
while on stats.fm, it shows:
- Artist A
- Artist D
- Artist B
- Artist F (not on top 5 for wrapped)
- Artist C
- Artist E
i think that spotify is definitely strategic with placing certain artists in certain positions. for example, “Artist F” probably was in top 5 last year as well (and is a successful but less-well-known artist), but went unlisted on wrapped this year and was replaced by Artist C, a global top 200 artist. and it worked - i had not listened to Artist C in a while, and when i saw my wrapped results, i started listening to them again.
Thats interesting. My lastfm and Spotify wrapped are basically identical. Every top song and artist are in the same order.
I guess if you feed it with your personal taste. My wrapped was all over the place. I only use Spotify in parties and ask everyone what do they want to enjoy.
Yeah… Takes note of everything you listen to, and when… But only when you’re using spotify lol
I stopped using Spotify because it doesn’t integrate well with home automation platforms (only with sonos) and because they wasted 100 mil on Joe Rogan (which made it clear I’m not their target market). I hate apple, but even they pay their artists
I want a service which is a bit more targeted, and its not really worth much. Its not exactly valuable information what I listened to lol (except to other music services)
On the one hand, better you know what they collect about you than not. And as long as you use a streaming service they’re collecting data on you.
On the other hand, streaming services are inherently wasteful and lead to pointless and excessive power usage which contributes to climate change, not to mention the privacy concerns, all of which could have been avoided by reasonably priced buy-once-own-forever media.
I’m not sure I agree with the power usage argument. Even for streaming services, all the ones I’m familiar with will cache songs you listen to frequently on your device (which they’re financially incentivized to do to reduce bandwidth) and isn’t consuming any more power than buy-once-own-forever. And if you’re comparing to physical media I’d assume it is far better, since you’re saving all the energy to acquire materials to create the media, write to it, package it, and ship it.
What if google made a Google Wrapped? With your Gmail, Youtube videos, locations, etc. That would be scary… That’s why they don’t do it
they do just that if you have location history turned on though
Just for locations, but is already scary enough
