It's A Wrap

Unless you live under a rock and/or don’t listen to music at all, you likely received your “Spotify Wrapped” annual end-of-year ritual and shared on social media what dominated your playlist this year. It’s a cross cultural trend now, and it’s fun. Each year Spotify pushes this out in the app and with two clicks you’re a part of a larger digital conversation.

Personally, this year I ventured into the genre-verse. I listened to 26 different genres – Spotify called me a little astronaut. They told me I kept it interesting from sunrise to sunset, starting my mornings with calm kindness healing, then seizing the day with lit fun laid back vibes and embraced the night with a powerful peaceful bold presence. Aren’t they cheeky? And with all that I apparently played 11,722 minutes this year… clearly, I’m no joke! And then they told me that where I really went in and gave all my love was with my top song…. For My Hand by Burna Boy featuring Ed Shereen.

Apparently, I listened to this song 135 times this year. Maybe that should be alarming because it would signal that I’ve become a Burna Boy fangirl. I can wholeheartedly confirm this is true. Spotify told me I listened to 789 songs this year and 563 different artists…. but none of them come close to the 1546 minutes I spent solely with Burna Boy. I’ve fallen in love with Nigerian Pop and he is the top of my playlist. I listened to every single Burna Boy song this year on repeat, and I swear I’m only mildly obsessed.

Additionally, this puts me in the top 0.5% of Burna Boy listeners in the world and for full transparency, I want some kind of award. Free concert tickets and a public shoutout will be accepted. 

If you’ve been a Spotify user for some time now you know the end-of-year wrap up of your playlist has been around since 2016, but it wasn’t packaged in this fun, shareable, bite-sized way. It was a simple “your top songs” list. In the past 2 years it’s really taken on a life of its own, linking itself to Instagram stories for example. Prompting that end-of year social connectivity that’s become a hit.

So how the heck did that happen?

Well, Jewel Ham is how. She’s an artist who was working as a Spotify design intern when she conceived of the interactive idea. She was assigned to make the end of year “wrapped” better appeal to Gen-Z. She didn’t know her work would be incorporated into Spotify’s current version of Wrapped at the time, or that it would take off as it did. And she also didn’t know she’d never get the proper dues for it. She shared that she worked long and hard on it and presented it to the team with great enthusiasm and was well received. That was her last day.

There’s a trend with companies and institutions capitalizing off Black creatives. And of course, there’s the argument that this is what internship is about. To which I respond… is it though?

Click here to see the full project

Internship is a valuable experience for the intern. And likewise, the company has nothing to lose by paying creatives for their time and/or a sizeable cheque for the ideas they intend to move forward with. And by sizeable, I mean make a significant dent in that intern’s student loan. Legally, of course, the work is property of the company, but this points to a larger problem in our culture. The appropriation of intellectual labor is not much different from the same exploitation of physical labor.

This past week, it really perturbed me how many people leapt out of their seats to leave a comment on the internet that Spotify did nothing wrong. It really portrays that the logic of dominant culture is precisely built on the notion that this is completely normal. That to extract and claim possession of Black, brown or any minority’s creativity and labor with no credit, compensation or recognition and consider it their “property” is normal because its' law. Laws are not made equal and like history is written by those with power to maintain their power.

Some people have great ideas. Others are only good at spotting the great ideas. Just because you’re good at spotting the good idea doesn’t make you the creator of the idea.

W.E.B DuBois in his prolific writings, frames modern whiteness as in terms of property relations, describing it as “a title to the universe” which casts its net over anything or anyone that isn’t white (land, resources, persons or thought) as personal possessions. This kind of possessive thinking is embedded in our culture, in something as “fun” as an end-of-year playlist. It’s an unspoken entitlement to have what is not truly yours.

In case you’re wondering, you don’t have to be white to participate and uphold white culture or the harm it does.

Everyone want to be great, but only few have great ideas. I wish that #SpotifyWrapped wasn’t tainted in this way, but it is. We can completely enjoyed our playlists and at the same time…

Jewel deserves to be compensated for her creativity and labor.

Everyone needs to be mindful that simply because something is normal doesn’t make it right.

You need to self-audit that you aren’t perpetuating this kind of ideology.

And I need to return to Burna Boy.

‘til next Sunday! Z.