And how did we produce a child whose Spotify listening age is 66? Our 22-year-old son’s top artists include Radiohead, Arcade Fire, St Vincent and Pink Floyd, demonstrating that we have brought him up with excellent taste. I am not clear on how that qualifies him as a musical sexagenarian.
There is, of course, a fatal flaw in Spotify’s AI-assessed, algorithmically driven promotional gimmick. It is presumably intended to make each listener feel unique and important, yet it seems to be based on flawed assumptions, corralling people into specious categories defined by the year a track was recorded. The data itself is deeply suspect.
Spotify’s top artist globally this year was Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny, outperforming Taylor Swift, who has broken multiple all-time chart, streaming and sales records. Swift only released her latest album in October, apparently too late for all of her streaming figures to be included. You might think that having access to the most up-to-date data would be part of the point of an exercise like this. The net result is an impression that Spotify doesn’t know its listeners half as well as it thinks it does.
