How Does Spotify Wrapped Work?

Courtesy of Spotify

On Wednesday (Dec. 1), Spotify users began unwrapping Wrapped, the annual Spotify end-of-year roundup that shows users their top artists, songs and podcasts of the year while also unveiling the top artists, songs, albums and podcasts of 2021 overall. But how does it really work? Though it’s certainly a nice peek behind the curtain of Spotify user data, it’s less clear how these top 5 lists are calculated.

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Adele

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Olivia Rodrigo

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Editors Note: Unless otherwise indicated, the methods Spotify employed to generate 2021’s Wrapped rankings apply to both the overall and individual tallies.

The three most anticipated Wrapped statistics – top 5 artists, top 5 songs and top 5 albums– are based on total number of streams (a stream being counted when a user listens to a track for at least 30 seconds, including offline listens). For the overall lists, streams are counted between January 1 and Nov. 27, though Spotify wouldn’t confirm the specific date they stopped tallying streams for the individual lists, saying only that it was “a few weeks prior” to Wrapped’s Dec. 1 launch date.

Whatever the case, that timeframe obviously privileges songs released early in the year, like Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” – the most-streamed song on Spotify both globally and domestically in 2021 – which was released way back on Jan. 8. Ditto Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” which was released on March 26 and ended the year as the second most-streamed track on Spotify’s global tally. (Note: Stream count doesn’t apply to the top 5 podcast lists. The overall list is ranked based on the number of unique listeners, while the individual list is ranked based on total minutes listened.)

Indeed, the majority of songs included on the top 5 global and U.S. lists were released in the first half of the year, including SZA’s “Kiss Me More” feat. Doja Cat (Apr. 9), Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves” (June 29) and Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” (May 14). The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay” was released just outside that timeframe (July 9), while Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” remix feat. DaBaby came out in Oct. 2020 but didn’t reach the peak of its popularity until early 2021, giving it lots of time over the course of the year to rack up streams.

By the same logic, it’s easy to see how late-in-the-year chart-busters like Adele’s “Easy on Me,” which was released Oct. 15, simply didn’t have a long enough window to reach the top 5 on either of Spotify’s overall song charts – much like Adele herself, whose 30 album wasn’t released until Nov. 19, just over a week before Spotify stopped counting streams for the Wrapped tallies. While it’s tempting to say “better luck next year” to Adele, streams that come at the high point of 30’s popularity – i.e. the last six weeks of 2021 – presumably won’t be counted for the purposes of the Wrapped 2022 rankings. Then again, Adele’s past album releases have endured far past their respective drop dates, so it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

As for Spotify’s top 5 artist lists, the No. 1 global artist of the year, Bad Bunny – who also finished at No. 5 on the Stateside chart – seems to have attained those rankings based at least in part on his prolific output. The Latin superstar has released seven singles and remixes so far this year, including the Hot 100 top 10 single “Yonaguni” and Hot 100 top 40 single “Volvi” with Aventura. Taylor Swift, who finished at No. 2 on both the global and U.S. artist rankings, released Evermore at the tail end of 2020 (Dec. 11) and this year put out two hugely popular re-recorded albums, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (Apr. 9) and Red (Taylor’s Version). (Caveat: The latter album was released Nov. 12, just two weeks before Spotify stopped tallying streams for the overall Wrapped lists.) While BTS (No. 3 on the global artist ranking) didn’t put out a proper album in 2021, they did release a plethora of remixes and alternate versions of pre-existing tracks as well as the hit Coldplay collab “My Universe,” which itself spawned a total of six remixes and alternate versions.

As Swift proved with her expansive album releases this year, album length also clearly matters in terms of Spotify’s artist and album tallies (the latter of which counts the total streams of all songs on a given album). Take, for example, Drake‘s Certified Lover Boy, which landed all of its 21 tracks in the top 40 of the Hot 100 the first week of the album’s release. Along with the rapper’s 3-track Scary Hours 2 EP and its Hot 100 No. 1 single “What’s Next” (both released Mar. 5), CLB‘s runtime was no doubt a significant factor in Drake’s No. 4 placement on Spotify’s global year-end artist tally. Kanye West, who finished at No. 4 on Spotify’s U.S. ranking and whose highly-anticipated, chart-topping album Donda contained 23 tracks, seems to have similarly benefitted from his 2021 project’s lengthy duration. It also bears noting that all seven artists who hit one or both of the top 5 artists rankings — a list that also includes Bieber and Juice WRLD — also boast extensive, well-loved back catalogs to help goose their annual stream counts on the platform (sorry, Olivia Rodrigo).

Finally, it’s worth noting that music listened to in Private Sessions – a.k.a. Spotify’s “incognito” mode – don’t count toward any top 5 lists, individual or overall, though they do count toward an individual user’s “total minutes listened” number (a stat that also includes podcasts).