Merry Wrapped-mas, everybody. Or, for those Apple Music users among us, Happy Replay-ukkah. Each year, Spotify Wrapped unleashes new, strange ways of analyzing qualitative data, such as claiming insane genres nobody’s ever heard of, like “escape room,†are your favorites. This year, upon Wrapped’s release on November 29, it unveiled a different and slightly confusing way of saying “You like Taylor Swift†with a new feature called “Sound Town.†Each Spotify user who opened their Wrapped was told which city their listening habits correspond to, spanning the globe. And they weren’t just major cities, either. While you could get New York City, for example, many people faced the news that their music apparently vibed with “Burlington, Vermont†or “Berkeley, California.†Other options included Cambridge (the one in Massachusetts), Tallahassee, Provo (in Utah), St. Paul, Islington (in the U.K.), or Austin.
“Sound Town was created to show users how their listening habits are shared by communities everywhere,†Spotify said in a statement to Vulture. “The Sound Town selected for each eligible user has the most similar taste profile to their own — based on their most streamed artists of the year and how those artists are streamed in other cities across the globe. It is objective and entirely driven by a user’s listening history.†That seems like a long way to go to tell gay people they should live in Berkeley if they like to club and near Harvard if they’re sad. But hey, it’s better than the year everybody got “dance pop†while we were still stuck in quarantine. We do hear Burlington has beautiful leaves (and boygenius) this time of year.