Spotify Wrapped and the Illusion of Choice

On Lo-fi Beats, Apple Music Envy, and What We Lose When the Algorithm Curates Our Identity

For a while, I thought I’d discovered something.

There was a certain lo-fi beats playlist I started listening to—late nights, headphones on, feeling like I was tapping into something niche, maybe even a little avant-garde. It felt personal, curated by mood and instinct rather than popularity. It felt like taste.

Then I realized everyone else had found it, too. Or rather, it had found us.

That same sound was everywhere—from YouTube study mixes to TikTok backdrops to startup office speakers. It turns out I wasn’t off the beaten path. I was on the algorithm’s express lane. What I’d experienced as self-discovery was, in retrospect, more like exposure fatigue. I’d heard it enough times that it became comforting, familiar. It passed the “I like this” test, not because it challenged me, but because it fit.

I don’t even use Spotify, by the way. I’ve been on Apple Music for years—which has had its own Replay feature for a while now, though it always felt like a quieter, less flashy cousin to Spotify Wrapped. For the first few years, I mostly watched from the sidelines as friends posted their Spotify stats with faux surprise and genuine delight. But even without participating, I still felt the pull. I was part of the same culture, swimming in the same streams—even if I wasn’t posting the receipts.

Now, Apple’s Replay has caught up in both presentation and promotion. And I get it: there’s something delightful about seeing your year distilled into clean lines and colorful charts. You feel seen. Your taste, your moods, your obsessions: all accounted for. And there’s a social joy in that too—swapping discoveries with friends, catching unexpected overlaps, sharing a little window into someone’s internal world. It’s part of the fun.

But there’s also something worth interrogating.

Kate Lindsay put her finger on it in an Embedded essay. After realizing Bleachers had somehow ended up as her #3 artist of the year, she traced the culprit—not to her own listening habits, but to Spotify’s tendency to start auto-playing Bleachers once her preferred band (The 1975) ran out of tracks. She didn’t choose Bleachers. They just happened. And they happened enough to make it into her Top 5.

Spotify wasn’t lying—but it also wasn’t neutral. It had quietly positioned certain artists, certain songs, in places where they were nearly impossible to avoid. Like a vending machine that nudges you toward the chips at eye-level, the algorithm creates the conditions in which your “preferences” can be gently guided—until they start to feel like your own.

None of this is limited to music, of course. PJ Vogt explored a similar tension in a recent Search Engine episode titled “How am I supposed to find new music?” The real question, though, isn’t just about music discovery—it’s about how all discovery is changing. When we outsource exploration to algorithms, we lose the friction. We don’t stumble. We don’t wander. We just… consume.

The illusion of choice is comforting. It tells us we’re curating our lives, when we’re really being handed options from a pre-sorted buffet. We think we’re selecting; we’re actually being sorted.

That’s not inherently dystopian. There’s real value in these tools. But they come with a subtle cost: the erosion of intentionality. Over time, our playlists, our viewing habits, even our reading lists, can become less a reflection of who we are and more a reflection of what’s been most effectively placed in front of us.

And here’s the kicker: we like it that way. We get a little hit of validation when the machine tells us who we are and gets it “right.” But if “what I like” becomes indistinguishable from “what I’ve been shown”—if my sense of self is continually shaped by the system—I lose the ability to tell where I end and the algorithm begins.

That’s the deeper tension behind Spotify Wrapped (or Apple Replay, or TikTok’s For You Page, or Netflix’s Top Picks): it’s not just about what we enjoy—it’s about what we become. The more we let convenience guide us, the harder it becomes to distinguish between taste and inertia.

Maybe the antidote isn’t to ditch the platforms entirely. But it might be to recover a sense of curiosity that resists the algorithm’s path of least resistance. To pursue things off the beaten track. To dig, to wander, to be surprised again.

Real taste isn’t just about what you like. It’s about how you found it—and whether you were awake for the journey.

So if you’re feeling the tug of algorithmic sameness, here are a few ways to push back:

1. Make one playlist by hand. Not based on what you’ve “liked,” but on a theme, a season, a memory, or a feeling. Pull from older albums, local artists, or songs you haven’t heard in years.
   
   

2. Follow a friend’s recommendation—really. Not the algorithm’s “people also like,” but a real human’s suggestion. Ask why they like it. Listen more than once.
   
   

3. Set aside one hour a week to explore without prompts. No autoplay, no “because you listened to...”—just intentional browsing. A record store, a music blog, Bandcamp, even CDs from your local library.
   
   

These aren’t revolutionary moves, but that’s kind of the point. Rediscovering taste—your taste—starts with small acts of attention.