Wrap your head around it: algorithmic self-making and performances of taste on Spotify Wrapped

This paper examines how Spotify Wrapped is perceived andunderstood by Brazilian users, exploring the algorithmic imaginaries(Bucher, 2017). that surround its appropriation in everyday life andhow the datafication and the dashboarding of music consumptionare incorporated into performances of taste (Airoldi, 2021; Prey,2018). Focusing on Wrapped as an annual ‘algorithmic event’(Annabell & Rasmussen, 2024) we contextualise it as part ofongoing discussions on the platformisation of music and thealgorithmic mediation of identity, as well as debates about digitalmemory and media events. Based on a social network analysis ofposts collected from Twitter/X and a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 38 Spotify users, we argue that in Brazilthe ‘eventness’ of Spotify Wrapped is distributed, clustered butsparsely connected, and marked by fleeting, fluid and ephemeralfeelings of shared experience and recognition rather than byenduring communities. Foregrounding ordinary acts of constrainedagency (Siles, et al., 2022), our findings also indicate that Brazilianusers playfully and skilfully incorporate the perceived logics ofdatafied consumption and algorithmic mediation to producedesirable Wrapped results - whilst also hoping that ’the algorithm’would be able to understand listening contexts and only capturethose sessions that are ’Wrapped-worthy’. We conclude byhighlighting the continuities and specificities of the phenomenonin relation to existing theorisations of everyday data cultures(Burgess et al., 2022). In doing so, we contribute to the growingbody of literature on music streaming studies, platform studies, andcritical algorithm studies.