What Your Spotify Says About You

by Lindsey Shellhammer

1. The “My Kids Hijacked My Spotify” Playlist

47% of your Spotify is Disney songs, cartoon theme music, and something called K-Pop Demon Hunters that you swear you never added. The rest is your original music from the early aughts, slowly being pushed further down the algorithmic food chain like a forgotten middle child. 

Your Spotify Wrapped is now a humiliating mix of The Kiboomers, Bluey, Baby Shark, and one sad Foo Fighters track clinging to relevance.

You keep telling yourself you’ll clean it up eventually, but deep down you know the truth: like a siren song, this playlist calls out to your inner child that you’ve been suppressing for the last 20 years and rediscovered when you built that COVID pillow fort.  

For the love of Yeti, just make your kids their own playlist already!! Then you won’t have to explain to coworkers why your top track is “PAW Patrol Pup Pup Boogie” (ask me how I know).

2. The Hyper-Organized Playlist 

You have a playlist for everything:

• Cleaning

• Work

• Really Gotta Work

• Driving at night

• Exercise

• Exercise but tired

• Exercise no caffeine

• Exercise no meds

• Exercise next to that buff guy at the gym

Each playlist is carefully curated and updated seasonally like a suburban mom’s throw pillows. You genuinely believe music selection is a form of personal branding.

Part of you thinks you’re Monica from Friends. The rest of us suspect you might just be a gremlin who created seventeen playlists to avoid doing actual work. 

You didn’t organize your life — you organized your procrastination. There’s a playlist for every mood except “meeting deadlines.” At this point, renaming songs and color-coding vibes is the task. You’re not managing your music; you’re curating the illusion of control while your to-do list quietly files a formal complaint.

3. The “I Don’t Have Spotify” Person

You say this with a certain smug pride.

“I don’t really use Spotify. I just listen to CDs…and the radio.”

We hate to be the ones to break this to you, but that sentence automatically adds fifteen years to your perceived age. Spotify has been around since 2008. At this point not having it is less of a preference and more of a lifestyle choice involving cargo shorts and saying things like “kids these days.”

You don’t discover new music—you encounter it accidentally while waiting for the weather report. Somewhere, a morning radio host named Dave Sprinkle is deciding your vibe for the day, and you’ve made peace with that.

4. The Nostalgia Time Machine

Your Spotify is 90% high school and college music. Your playlist is so outdated it could be installed in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Every song instantly transports you back to driving around with friends, dramatic breakups, and thinking $20 to fill up a gas tank was a financial burden.

Listening to your playlist feels like opening a time capsule labeled “When My Knees Still Worked.” It features artists like Coldplay, Jay-Z, Linkin Park, and, your deepest darkest secret: Miley Cyrus.

You say things like, “Man, they don’t make music like this anymore,” which is technically true because most of the bands on your playlist broke up in 2009.

5. The Algorithm Has Taken Over

You don’t actually know what music you like anymore. Spotify tells you what you like now.

Your entire listening history is Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and something called “Indie Chill Coffeehouse Sunset Vibes.” You don’t really like that last one, but you don’t want to upset the Spotify Gods so you listen to it anyway. You can’t risk screwing up the algorithm.

At this point you’re basically a musical houseplant being watered directly by the Spotify recommendation engine. Hopefully they’re better at murdering watering plants than you are.

6. The One Song on Repeat Person

You’ve listened to the same song 43 times in one single week and now it appears in every playlist Spotify generates for you from now until the end of time. You don’t even like the song anymore. You just can’t stop.

Spotify Wrapped will later describe this as “Your Hyperfixation Era,” which is a polite corporate way of saying you spiraled to one three-minute track for reasons only the Google search engine knows.

The track? “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. (Don’t worry—your secret’s safe with us.) It could be worse. 

Fair warning: our fortune teller tells us your next mid-life crisis will consist of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” No judgment, dude. You do you.

7. The Chaotic Playlist

Your playlist goes from Metallica to Taylor Swift to Gregorian chanting to ‘Lo-Fi Beats While Avoiding Responsibilities’ to that Wellerman sea shanty somebody sent you back in ‘21.

There is no theme. No structure. No logic. You find order in the chaos (or maybe you just have ADHD).

Listening to your Spotify is like riding in a clown car, listening to a radio controlled by 3 schizophrenic monkeys trapped in the late 90s. How do we know they’re from the 90s? The monkeys use way too much hair gel.  

Psychologists would call this a personality trait (and bill you accordingly). Spotify calls it “eclectic.”

8. The Low-Key Sad Indie Playlist

Your most played playlist is called something like “Rainy Window Energy.” (If only it were “Big D**k Energy” instead.)

It’s full of quiet indie artists whisper-singing about heartbreak, existential dread, and the passage of time. You know, like back when Taylor Swift was a country singer.

You say you like it because it’s “vibey,” but the Yeti has reviewed the data and would like to gently suggest maybe going outside for a walk. When was the last time the backs of your knees saw the sun?

Look, Indie music has its place and all, but watch out for the vortex that will trap you in its many-ringed fingers and beanie-wearing hipster smugness. 

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No matter which playlist is yours, the Yeti embraces all of them. 

Want to know what the Yeti likes to listen to? Here's its super special, never-before-seen playlist.