I’ve long made my loathing of Spotify known to friends, acquaintances—basically anyone who'll endure my rants. Yet, there’s one day each year that tempts me to convert to the platform as my primary form of listening: Spotify Wrapped Day. For the past several years, I’ve relished watching—and, naturally, judging—my friends’ gamified listening habits, all dressed up in Spotify’s undeniably slick visual aesthetic. As they flaunt their Kendrick obsession and proudly disclose the ungodly amount of time they spent listening to boygenius over the past year, I find myself jealous that I can’t join in. I would love to tell everyone that I’m one of the most loyal Yo La Tengo fans in the world, but I just don’t have the Spotify receipts to back it up.

The day always feels like a missed opportunity for me to flex one of the aspects of my personality that I hold most dear: my taste in music—broad, nerdy, and populist all at once, ranging from Bjork to Blink-182 to William Basinski (though I doubt any of the hour-long tracks on The Disintegration Loops would ever top my “most-streamed tracks” list). More significantly, it’s a day when I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on connecting with like-minded music lovers and participating in what is, in many ways, a joyful cultural phenomenon celebrating music.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Spotify Wrapped is not really a celebration of music. It’s a shameless glorification of surveillance capitalism, a glossy repackaging of your personalized metadata into free advertising for a streaming behemoth that hardly needs it. From a psychological level, the success of the campaign lies in how deftly it satisfies both the individual ego and the communal instinct. By flaunting your unique taste as exemplified by your super hip top five artists or bragging about being in the top percentage of one of those artists’ listeners, you’re not just sharing—you’re also attaching yourself to the artist’s cachet, basking in the glow of perceived superiority. Wrapped centers music as data, transforming listening into a competitive sport. This gamification keeps you glued to the app, changing your listening habits to maintain those coveted metrics, all to pad their profits.

Before I get too far into this spiel, let me clarify: this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud” rant against modernity. That’s not my intention at least. My aim here is to try and reconcile the streaming giant’s myriad sins with the joy Wrapped brings to so many people. Hate it or love it, Spotify’s on top, a platform deeply embedded in our cultural fabric, and for many, its appeal is unshakable. So, let’s grapple with that reality while also acknowledging the darker truths.

So, more on those darker truths. I’ll try to keep this brief. Spotify has institutionalized the devaluation of music that began with Napster at the turn of the millennium. Though it relies on constant capital injections to keep the lights on at company headquarters, it has successfully transformed how we consume music, forcing competitors to adopt its exploitative blueprint. That exploitative blueprint primarily extracts from the artists. While Spotify grants us access to more music than we could ever listen to in a dozen lifetimes for a pittance, there’s a big catch. Artists earn mere fractions of a penny per stream, making it nearly impossible for anyone outside Taylor Swift’s tax bracket to make a living. Approximately 70% of musicians earn next to nothing, 30% scrape by on minimum wage, and only a sliver see real money. There’s more to critique about the mechanics of the company’s payout system, but I can already feel Spotify stans scrolling away, so let’s move on.

Beneath Spotify’s fun-loving image, perpetuated most effectively through Wrapped, is another tech juggernaut sucking the blood of labor and accelerating planetary decline. CEO Daniel Ek, worth $7 billion after cashing out $283 million in shares, is richer than any musician in history. When he’s not making tone-deaf remarks about how struggling artists should work harder, he’s investing in the global military-industrial complex, through emerging AI technology. If that reads as tangential, consider the military-tech podcasts Spotify hosts, and its habit of censoring content critical of the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. These connections are, at best, unsettling.

What about the platform itself? In terms of functionality and overall satisfaction it leaves a lot to be desired. Longtime users have criticized Spotify’s decline in navigability, its increasingly TikTok-ified interface, and its recent price hikes. While Spotify claims to broaden users’ horizons, the platform’s underlying profit motive means that its algorithms often do the opposite, nudging listeners toward familiar, more immediately enjoyable content instead of new discoveries. Had Spotify existed when I was ten, I might still be trapped in an airless capsule, suffocating on nu-metal and post-grunge butt rock.

Okay, okay, okay, we get it. Spotify is evil, but is it really that evil? Most apps harvest our data, but few give back anything as dopaminergic as Wrapped in return. Exploitation in the music industry is hardly new, and artists have long been shortchanged in terms of royalties. It’s not like the other streaming services pay artists much better. Daniel Ek is far from the only CEO of a major tech company with morally questionable investments. The “enshittification” of Spotify is arguably less pronounced than similar declines in quality from platforms such as Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber. Musical tastes are arguably less static now than ever before.

These points are valid, and those of us who bristle at the devaluation of the album and the “content-ification” of music need to stop pining for an illusory past where every instance of music consumption was a rigorous, intellectual exercise that involved listening to a full album on an analog medium with a hi fidelity stereo. It wasn’t. There is no “right” way to engage with music. Our appreciation of it operates in vastly different ways. As someone who’s released music, I’d love for listeners to experience albums I’ve worked on in their entirety, but once a record’s out there, how people consume it is out of my control. With such a colossal mass of recorded music competing for attention, I’m grateful that anyone’s listening at all.

With all this in mind, let’s turn back to Spotify Wrapped. In an era where joy and connection can be precarious resources, I am all for people sharing their Wrapped stats. Still, I hope Spotify users take a moment to reflect on what the mechanisms behind this campaign are. Are the metrics that Spotify has dictated are central to satisfaction actually synonymous with enjoying music? Is a song’s play count indicative of its value? If so, are we limiting the breadth of sounds, voices, and emotional responses that we engage with because of that value judgement? Why do we have access to this information about our listening habits, and more importantly, why does Spotify, and what are the consequences? How does celebrating that you’re in the top 0.05% of a cool artist’s fans interact with traditional gatekeep-y hierarchies of music fandom?

Most importantly, we should all question whether artist exploitation is inevitable for digital music to remain widely accessible. Use your power as Spotify customers—limited though it may be—to demand fairer compensation for creators. In fact, you can do that right here and signal your support for the Living Wage for Musicians Act. I encourage you to sign and share it alongside your Spotify Wrapped stats this year. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but not all unethical consumption is equally unethical. Spotify can do better, and we all can, too.