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Spotify’s New ‘Listening Age’ Drives Viral Wrapped Sharing and Confusion

Spotify estimates formative years from release-date patterns, yielding counterintuitive ages users are posting widely.

Overview

  • Wrapped 2025 added a listening-age metric that assigns a notional age based on the era a user over-indexed on this year.
  • Spotify reported 500 million social shares in the first 24 hours of Wrapped, a 41% jump from last year.
  • The company says the metric draws on the reminiscence-bump concept and analyzes song release dates across a five-year span.
  • Spotify requires a date of birth on the account and at least five streams within a five-year release-date band to calculate the value.
  • Users and media documented surprising results, including assigned ages as high as 86 or 100 despite heavy listening to recent artists.