Excited chatter fills the classroom as students gather around to share their phone screens one by one. Catchy tunes play through the phone’s speakers and colorful graphics fill the screen while surprised and thrilled expressions come across students’ faces.

Music consumes teenagers’ daily lives, whether it’s to jam out to on a long car ride, have it as background noise while doing homework or putting in Airpods to avoid talking to people in the hallway.

On Nov. 29, Spotify and Apple Music released their annual Wrapped and Replay for their subscribers and it is a hot topic of conversation. This comes out close to the end of the year to give users a personalized recap of their listening habits for that year.

The streaming service starts collecting data on Jan. 1 and compiles it throughout the year until Oct. 31; however, this year a Spotify spokesperson announced that they made the cutoff date closer to the release date so users will have an even more personalized collection. 

Spotify Wrapped creates a fun slideshow, with each slide showing the users’ top five genres, artists, songs and how many minutes they listened to music on the app, while songs the user had on repeat plays in the background. 

Along with revealing the top artist for the year, the slideshow indicates the percentage the consumer is in for the artist’s top listener and the top listeners that are within 0.001%. To be at such a high percentage requires a lot of dedication and loyalty towards the artist. 

Spotify Wrapped comes out every year, but this year the program came out with new features such as “Me in 2023” where they classify the listener as a character that fits them and “Sound Town” where the user is matched to a location where their listening habits is the same as a majority population of that town. 

Though everyone has different tastes in music due to the multitude of artists and genres to pick from, the Spotify Wrapped event continues to unite teenagers through a common passion: music.