Wrap Your Head Around It: Brazilian Users' Algorithmic Imaginaries of Spotify Wrapped

‘Spotify Wrapped’ is a promotional initiative offered by the music platform consisting of a summary of each user’s yearly listening habits. Although Spotify is generally classified as a streaming service, initiatives such as Wrapped have a clear component of sociability (Hagen & Lüders 2017) – in this case, not only because they are based on the harvesting of users’ behavioural data but also because they are created to be shared on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter/X. Indeed, Spotify Wrapped has acquired its own role in digital popular culture, inciting anticipation and excitement from users worldwide and becoming an 'algorithmic event' (Annabell & Vindum Rasmussen 2023) in and of itself. In this paper, we propose to scrutinise how this algorithmic event is perceived and understood by Brazilian users, whilst also identifying and unpacking the platform affordances and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017) that inform those interpretations and their associated performances of taste and identity (Airoldi, 2019, Prey, 2018). We explore in particular how users negotiate the tensions between algorithmic personalisation and individuation and the possibilities for shared experience to emerge during this event. Through a mixed-method approach, we argue that the 'eventness' (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018) of Spotify Wrapped is distributed, clustered but sparsely connected, and marked by fleeting, fluid and ephemeral feelings of shared experience and recognition rather than by enduring communities, which in turn reflects and extends previous theorisations of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2014) and social media liveness (Lupinacci, 2021)