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Maverick, nomad, deep diver…? Spotify tunes in to the hidden you

By Patrick Sawer SENIOR NEWS REPORTER

ARE you a time traveller or a deep diver? A maverick or a voyager? No, these aren’t tech job descriptions or a travel agent’s shorthand – they’re music listening personalities, as determined by the computer algorithms of the world’s biggest music streaming app.

Spotify has crunched its data as part of its annual “Wrapped” feature, a personalised analysis of its 456 million users’ tastes and habits that many music lovers share online.

But this year they have added two new categories to identify music fans’ traits when it comes to picking what they listen to.

These are their “listening personality”, which determines what kind of music they prefer, and their “Spotify mood”, which describes the way each subscriber feels based on what they listened to at different times of day.

Some listening personalities are selfexplanatory, such as “the Top Charter”, and “the Devotee”. There is also “the Maverick”, who is “frollicking in the sidestream” – exploring the outer reaches of pop – while everyone else is “bathing in the mainstream”.

Which personality you fit into is determined by four metrics: familiarity v exploration; loyalty v variety; timelessness v newness; commonality v uniqueness.

Spotify assesses whether users listen repeatedly to their favourite artists (familiarity), or sample a lot of new musicians (exploration); whether they return to the same songs and play them on repeat (loyalty) or spin through a lot of music before repeating (variety).

Spotify’s “moods”, which describe the type of music played on a morning commute or during an evening at home, go further than traditional genres.

They include “Trad Goth creative Spooky”, “Hopeless Romantic Rebellious Lighthearted” and “Hectic Heartache Raver”, “Mellow Nostalgia Fun” and “Love Happy Upbeat”.

Marie Rönn, Spotify global group creative director, said: “Genres don’t give you the nuance of what type of mood you’re in, so we wanted to try to tell you a little bit about your musical mood throughout the year.”

But the categories have stumped some music fans.

Hannah Mccarthy, a writer and creative director of Alamo Drafthouse, a US cinema chain, wrote on Twitter: “Did other people get normal things for their Spotify Wrapped, or is it just me out here getting ‘vampire mayhem gothic goblincore’?”

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2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/281603834489346

Daily Telegraph