Spotify has a knack for mining your listening data into something fun and shareable rather than weird and creepy for its annual “Wrapped” feature. This year, it outdid itself.
The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a “Listening Age,” which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went viral, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes.
At the risk of reading too much into something that’s ultimately good fun, Wrapped’s expanding purview is a reminder of how the things you listen to can speak to who you are as a person, which could end up being valuable data. Your Listening Age is mostly a silly diversion, but it could also be a kind of flex as Spotify expands its targeted advertising ambitions.
Heading into 2026, Spotify is under pressure from shareholders to boost ad revenue. While 63% of monthly active users are on Spotify’s free, ad-supported plan, they only made up about 10% of revenues last quarter. Analysts such as Rich Greenfield have criticized Spotify for disappointing ad revenue growth, and the company launched a programmatic ad exchange earlier this year to scale up its ad placements.
The shift toward programmatic advertising, in which ads are bought and sold through automated systems, will entail granular targeting of users based on what Spotify knows about them. Spotify has long boasted to advertisers about being able to target ads based on users’ listening behaviors and interests, and says its programmatic ads will let advertisers “reach users based on moods, mindsets and moments.”
This doesn’t exactly come across in Spotify’s user-level data. If you download a copy of it, you’ll find an “Inferences” section in which Spotify tries to guess some things about you, based on both your usage of the service and on data from advertisers, but some users have puzzled over how wildly inaccurate this data can be. For instance, it categorized one user as both Democrat and Republican, and another as simultaneously getting engaged and divorced.
But this year’s Spotify Wrapped shows that there’s another level of analysis going on, one that might be a little more nuanced than just your likes and interests. As Spotify notes, your Listening Age is based not simply on when your most-played songs came out, but how those tastes compare to other people who are your actual age. It’s reminiscent of Wrapped 2023’s “Sound Town” feature, in which each user was given a city with which their musical tastes lined up.
