Every December marks the season of year-in-review on our favorite apps. Even the SNCF and Wikipedia have joined in, offering our 2025 year in review. But the most anticipated “Wrapped” is likely the one from Spotify, Deezer and other music apps. Fun to share, these top lists of our listening habits come back to us like mirrors that are a little too honest about the year that has passed…
The season of year-in-review for 2025 is underway! Spotify Wrapped, Apple Replay, Deezer stats… the apps in our daily musical lives whip out the data, in the form of personalized ceremonies ready to be shared on our social networks, as if we were brandishing a tarot card spread. In the stories it’s a rush, whether we publicly betray ourselves or claim our tribe: “Chappell Roan my life”, “Boss Lady like Théodora”, “My Ariana Grande top isn’t representative, I swear”, “No, but I listened to Taylor Swift for the joke, no heartbreak on the horizon”…
Behind these self-portraits in feigned denials and genuine pride, something deeper flows. Our musical year-in-reviews are also sociological, emotional, and communal mirrors. They remind us how we navigate between several worlds, that of our emotions as well as our tastes, that of algorithms and community dynamics – a good gay listens to Aya, a good lesbian King Princess –, but above all that of our personal histories.
A miniature research field
Because unlike scientific tests of the type “What kind of dog are you?”, which you can find in têtu pages, your musical year-in-review really has nothing of a psychological profile. It is a battleground where inheritances, desires and social codes, identity and self-representations clash. As Bourdieu teases apart in La Distinction, our tastes do not arise spontaneously: they are shaped by our socializations, our milieus, our cultural resources. What we love “naturally” is also what our belonging worlds have taught us to deem legitimate, cool, shameful, too mainstream or too niche. The musical year-in-review sorts, selects, smooths. It gives the illusion of revealing something about oneself, a rooted personality, while it first highlights the systems in which we circulate.
And, if there is one space where these codes travel at the speed of light, it is definitely queer culture: we inherit playlists as much as codes, choruses as much as poses. Ariana Grande for the camp and emotional survival, Taylor Swift for lyrics that heal in breakups, Charli XCX for insolence, Chappell Roan for sapphic chaos, Eddy de Pretto for fragility… As American sociologist Madison Moore defends in Fabulous and in her writings on techno and queer culture: music is not mere background noise, it is a site of identity performance, resistance, and the creation of spaces for marginalized communities.
Share or not, that is the question
We like to think that Spotify is a sincere confidant, but in reality, it is above all a discreet architect of our tastes. Anthropologist Nick Seaver, author of Computing Taste, has studied the designers of music recommendation systems. He shows that these algorithms are not neutral and that they steer our listening. Taina Bucher, associate professor in Digital Media at the University of Oslo, reminds in If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics that algorithms are arrangements that decide what becomes visible or not. In other words, your top music not only reflects what you love, but also what the platform has judged worthy of putting in front of you. You listen to “Holocene” by Bon Iver on a heartbreak night, and you find yourself subscribed to six months of melancholic folk, even if you spend your nights sweating to techno with poppers on the club dance floor.
The public sharing adds a political cherry on the cake. Publishing one’s top artist is never neutral: it is saying “here is the version of me I choose to make visible”. And when one belongs to a queer community where tastes are coded, hierarchized, full of symbols, the Wrapped becomes a light form of cultural coming out. “Are you still listening to Dua Lipa?“, “Mylène isn’t in your top? Are you out of the scene or what?”. Our listening choices carry consequences. Some brandish their top like a flag while others apologize for it in the caption already. Judith Butler explains it about gender: the performative is what we repeat in order to be recognized. In the queer world, showing one’s music can also be a repetition and concern a matter of recognition and validation. It’s about showing that we know the codes, or conversely that we reject them.
Validate My Top Artist
If we are to trust the sociologist Bernard Lahire, our tastes are bound to yo-yo depending on the context. In L’Homme pluriel, he shows that we are beings traversed by multiple socializations – family, school, work, groups of friends, cultural communities – which leave in us sometimes divergent traces. Nothing to do with a unified habitus as Bourdieu suggests. We are living patchworks. We listen to classical music at work to concentrate, then we scream “yes bitch slay” to hyperpop at after-hours. The same person can show Lana Del Rey, Pomme, Rosalía, and a techno remix of Kylie Minogue without anyone crying wolf about inconsistency. Lifting weights at the gym to sacred rap will never stop you from being a pink pony girl once back in your pink pony world. Don’t blush, we are all in the same boat.
Our enthusiasm for posting our year-in-reviews is not just staging. It is also an archive, a way of noting that we went through a breakup (January 100% Boygenius), a ecstatic queer summer (July Beyoncé Renaissance), a move (November Ultra comforting playlist), a period of intensive clubbing (top 1: Kompromat without any shame). Perhaps this is its strength: it never says exactly who we are; it says how we traversed the year. Come on, we’ll start the playlist and move on to the next year!
