Nina Chae-Gordon is 26.
Spotify, however, thinks she’s older. More than half a century older, actually. Based on her listening habits from this year, the streaming platform deemed Ms. Chae-Gordon to be, musically speaking, 89.
The assessment was part of Spotify Wrapped, the platform’s annual summation of users’ listening habits that presents data on how many times users streamed certain songs and artists. This year, the report also included a so-called listening age.
“If you listen to way more music from the late 1970s than others your age, we playfully hypothesize that your ‘listening’ age is 63 today, the age of someone who would have been in their formative years in the late 1970s,” Spotify explained in a release.
Ms. Chae-Gordon, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said she was surprised by the result given that her top artists for the year were contemporary artists, like the singer Olivia Dean and the funky, vibe-y trio Khruangbin.
She thought her job in Broadway public relations might have tipped the geriatric scales. Ms. Chae-Gordon said she devoted time this year to listening to artists like Bobby Darin and Connie Francis while working on the ’60s jukebox musical “Just in Time.”
On social media, many Spotify users had mixed reactions to their assigned ages. Some wore their years like a badge of honor, a show of refinement. (The experimental musician Grimes posted her listening age on X: 92.) Others, whose Spotify ages skewed younger, blamed their children’s taste.
Jenni Byrne-Mosley, a 41-year-old who works in architectural woodworking, said that her 10-year-old son’s penchant for listening to indie video game soundtracks had probably led to her Spotify-assigned age of 30. The platform allows users to exclude certain playlists from their end-of-year results, Ms. Byrne-Mosley said, but her attempts to keep her Wrapped “clean” were unsuccessful.
Listening age follows in a recent tradition of Spotify issuing gimmicky, loosely data-backed offerings designed to get their users to share the results on social media and engage in discourse with friends and strangers.
In 2023, Spotify placed listeners in cities around the world based on their music taste. Some users felt at home in their assigned locale — this reporter’s so-called “sound town” was, in fact, New York City — but others were baffled as to how their listening habits correlated to, for instance, Burlington, Vt.
In 2022, many users laughed after the Wrapped copy described their layered taste as “like an onion.”
Payman Kassaie, the global brand director for Spotify, said the Wrapped team had a sneaking suspicion listening age would elicit strong reactions.
“You can always tell which stories are the ones that are going to be exciting, because when we get our own data for the first time, what do we talk about the most?” Mr. Kassaie said, describing a meeting where his team received their own listening ages. “There was such stark contrast between all the people in this meeting and it felt really indicative of their personalities.”
Mr. Kassaie’s assigned age was 17.
“It was just a little embarrassing,” he said. “I listen to a lot of Playboi Carti.”
While some users reacted with shame, others reported feeling some unexpected emotions as a result of their Spotify results.
Annie Rauwerda, whose chronological age is 26, said her listening age was 79, a number she attributed to time she spent this year listening to “’60s and ’70s Laurel Canyon folk music.”
Ms. Rauwerda, who lives in Brooklyn and runs @depthsofwikipedia, an Instagram account that chronicles oddities of the online encyclopedia, said she soon learned she wasn’t the only one in her circle who was, as far as taste in tunes are concerned, nearly 80.
Her ex-boyfriend’s listening age was also 79, she learned after seeing his Instagram story. The two, who remain friendly, spoke on the phone shortly after to discuss.
“It made us miss each other,” she said.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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