It’s the most wonderfully cooked time of year — Spotify Wrapped season. That festive time when we all get absolutely read to filth over all the bullshit stuff we’ve listened to over the last 12 months. If we all thought 2020 was filled with weird shit while we mentally grappled with the state of the world, then 2021 is something else entirely.
Before we get into all the sideways shit — like the fact a friend of mine listened to over 23,000 minutes of one (1) podcast — let us take a dive into what us Aussies were obsessed with on Spotify over 2021.
The most streamed artist for us this year was the one and only Taylor Swift, which is deeply unsurprising, while the top track was Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves’ — also unsurprising considering the UK band took out the Hottest 100 this year.
Locally, our most-streamed artist was The Kid LAROI, who has knocked it out of the park this year in the top five Spotify Wrapped lists in both the world and at home in Australia with ‘STAY’ and ‘WITHOUT YOU’. We do love that for our young king from Redfern.
Olivia Rodrigo had a stellar year in our earholes as well, with her debut album SOUR coming in at #1 in Australia, with everyone’s fave ginge Ed Sheeran coming in a close second with his album, = (equals).
Importantly, and what we’re all definitely logged on for, we listened to some weird shit this year. Spotify’s ‘Music For Plants’ playlist (which slaps, by the way) grew neatly 1400% over the pandemmy months, and people really got into sea shanties this year — so much so that there’s more than 180,000 playlists with that yo-ho theme that popped up this year.
spotify wrapped 2021 be like
top artist: bon iver
top genre: hyperpop vapor twitch bass boost— chet porter (@chetporter) December 1, 2021
The genres got weird as fuck this year too, with people finding themselves listening to things classed as ‘weirdcore’, ‘dream SMP’, ‘otacore’ and ‘humppa’.
rt if the “dreamsmp” genre was in ur spotify wrapped pic.twitter.com/Ehnagr6bTM
— rora (@lvlyqnf) December 1, 2021
For those playing at home, ‘Dream SMP’ is absolutely Minecraft roleplay-related.
This year’s microgenres really woke up and chose chaos this year — I’ve seen everything from ‘Early romantic era’ to ‘Final Fantasy’, ‘Precure’ to ‘Acteurs’. As Cady Heron once declared, the limit does not exist.
Go forth and enjoy the biggest read of the calendar year, friends. The Spotify library is open and the shades are on.
