The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

Spotify and Apple Music wrap up the songs of 2020

Spotify celebrated an unprecedented year for their users with a list of their most streamed songs, artists, podcasts and genres for the culmination of 2020 on Dec. 2.

Lavinia Tyagi ’23 said she enjoyed getting back the lists on Spotify and it let her reflect on her past year.

“My most listened to song was “A Different Age” by Current Joys which is also in my sleep playlist,” Tyagi said. “This song reeks of nostalgia and will always make me feel comforted. Listening to this song with another person for the first time feels like giving each other a hug.” 

Spotify numbered the amount of new genres and artists that each user listened to, as well as whether or not the user is in the top percentage of listeners for their favorite artist. The company also added the number of streams from Spotify’s Black Lives Matter Playlist with over 64 million listens. 

Hundreds of the school’s students use Spotify, several having premium accounts

Many students, such as Thea Pine’ 23  took time to discuss their wrapped playlists with their peers.

“I had a few conversations with my friends about their Spotify wrapped and I got to see a lot of people’s wrapped on their social media stories,” Pine said. “It definitely brought back some old memories of 2020, good and bad. Looking at the data, it was nostalgic to see songs that I had listened to in the beginning of the year and interesting to see how my music taste shifted. I was also at the top two percent  of Cage the Elephant listeners.” 

The male artist with the most monthly listeners was BadBunny and the female artist was Billie Eilish. The most listened to song was “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd. There are also other statistics that were given about most listened to albums and podcasts.  

Apple Music and other platforms including Pandora also joined in on the summarizing trend this year

Apple Music also created their own list of the listener’s top 100 most listened to songs and top 10 most listened to albums. Stella Glazer ’23, along with many other students shared their statistics on various social media platforms.

“I was really proud that I listened to 210 hours of Machine Gun Kelly and was in the top 0.01 percent of his listeners so I wanted to flex it on my Instagram Story,” Glazer said. 

Additionally, celebrities like Sydney Sweeney and Megan Rapinoe spoke about their playlists after public endorsements from Spotify.

Mr. Levine, among other teachers who use the platform spoke about his virtual listening party with friends and his top listened to artists. 

“I loved seeing the data from my year of music. While my top artist and song were expected, other information was surprising,” Mr. Levine said. “For example, I listened to 520 new artists this year and 384 different genres. I was astonished to see that EDM was my top genre.”

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Spotify and Apple Music wrap up the songs of 2020