Hey Spotify, why the heck am I ‘Provo, Utah’?
It’s the most wonderful time of year — Spotify Wrapped season! Every year, the music streaming service aggregates its users’ listening data and presents them with fun little infographics about their most-listened-to artists and songs. In addition to the standard things like your Top Artist (Taylor Swift for me) and Top Song of the year (thanks to an association with an NPC in our D&D game, mine was Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”), Spotify likes to get a little quirky and come up with other categories like listening archetypes. This year, one such category was “Sound Town,” which supposedly tells you which town’s population has the listening habits most similar to yours.
And somehow, I got Provo, Utah.
I mean no offense to people who live in Provo, Utah, but what the fuck? According to Spotify, this is because I listen to Taylor Swift, Mitski, and Sleeping at Last. Which, all right, fine, maybe this specific combination is more common in Provo than it is in the rest of the world. But looking at other people’s “Sound Town” results has me wondering how Spotify calculated this, because people who also got Provo have tastes that seem completely different from mine.
For starters, the same handful of towns keep popping up (at least, judging by reports from my very U.S.-centric social media feeds): Provo, Utah; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Davis, California; Berkeley, California; Bozeman, Montana; Boulder, Colorado; and, perhaps most commonly, Burlington, Vermont. But it’s not like these towns are generating similar music tastes.
burlington usa according to spotify wrapped pic.twitter.com/b2AESPzV6s
I’ve seen Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Fiona Apple, Death Grips, and boygenius all associated with Burlington as a Sound Town
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