8 listening analysers worth checking out after Spotify Wrapped 2022
Hungry to know more about your listening habits? These Spotify Wrapped alternatives might fix that.
Image: Mikael Vaisanen
If Spotify Wrapped 2022 hasn’t quenched your thirst for musical self-knowledge, here are eight alternatives that offer more insight into your listening and turn your favourite tracks into Pokémon cards.
Instafest
The newest kid on the music analysis block turns your top artists into an imaginary festival line-up. Drawing from either your last four weeks, last six months or all-time listens, Instafest lets you choose from three festival poster styles to show off your music taste with friends and followers.
Apple Music Replay
If you prefer Apple Music’s offerigs, check out the overhauled Apple Music Replay that launched yesterday (29 November) for web browsers. Similar to last year’s Spotify Wrapped experience, you’ll be taken through a journey of your top songs and artists in 2022 with some animated cards. Once you’re done, you can add your Apple Music Replay 2022 playlist to your Music app.
How Bad Is Your Spotify
The Pudding’s take on Wrapped subjects your listening habits to critique by a snarky AI trained on “over two million indicators of objectively good music” – which it says includes “Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations, and subreddits you’ve never heard of.”
How Bad Is Your Spotify launched in 2021, but we’re still recovering from the wounds of being called a Nujabes stan.
Obscurify
Along with showing you how obscure your music tastes are compared to others, Obscurify presents some fascinating data about your listening: has what you’ve been listening to been generally ‘happy’? Or more danceable and energetic? And do you have a preference for electronic or acoustic instruments? You can also explore your listening by the decades they were released with the ‘By The Decades’ function.
musicScapes
Musicapes is a little different than others in this list, as it turns your listening trends into a landscape. This translates the mood and key of the songs you’ve been playing into colour; the energy level of those tracks to mountain shapes, and more.
Run BPM
After pointing it to one of your Spotify playlists to analyse, Run BPM shows you a breakdown of tracks with normal and double-time tempos, keys, alongside other data points from Instrumentalness to Valence. You’re also able to filter out tracks that don’t fit in your BPM range, and create a new playlist with the tracks remaining. While it was originally meant for fitness playlist creation, we can see this one being just as useful for DJs… maybe even more so.
Discover Quickly
So, you’ve subscribed to Four Tet’s 155-hour playlist and are now realising that nobody’s got time to flit through 2,000 songs. That’s where the massively helpful Discover Quickly comes in.
Discover Quickly lays out tracks on a massive grid, and lets you hover over each to hear a snippet. It’s a rapid way to preview tracks – and you also get to do this with your saved tracks, top tracks, top artists and more.
PokePlaylist
Why stop at festival posters when you can have Pokémon cards? PokePlaylist is a true nostalgia fest that imagines your top artists as just that, with tracks represented as different attacks. You can generate cards from your last month, six months or a year’s worth of listening. Plus, the web app also incorporates popularity rank and follower numbers into stats – very nifty.
How does Spotify Wrapped work?
Launched in 2016, Spotify Wrapped is perhaps the biggest user event of the world’s most popular streaming service, and it’s been helping users learn more about their listening habits, as well as those of friends and family.
The most-anticipated categories of Wrapped are Top 5 Artists, Top 5 Songs, and Top 5 Albums, and those look at your total streams, counting 30 seconds of playback as one listen. Spotify previously confirmed in a response to a community post that it only collects data for Wrapped between 1 January to 31 October, leaving out the months of November and December.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on this submission for an extended period of time, and it doesn’t seem this will reach the votes necessary to put it forward for prioritisation,” wrote the company to a user requesting November and December’s listens be considered in the campaign. This may explain why Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You never makes it onto our top tracks…
