Everyone’s favourite time of the year is here – Spotify Wrapped 2023 was released last Wednesday. The music platform’s most popular feature includes various analytics on users’ streaming patterns, including their top five artists, their top five songs, their streaming time in minutes and a neat little infographic at the end perfect for sharing to Instagram stories.
Brig have released a survey on Stirling University students’ music-listening habits according to Spotify Wrapped. Here are the results and an assessment of what they tell us about the student population at the university:
Top Artists
This year, Spotify wrapped listed users’ top five artists based on how much time they had spent streaming them throughout 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Stirling University’s top artist this year was Taylor Swift, 2023’s most-streamed artist globally, according to statistics released by Spotify. It has been a massive year for Swift, who just released concert movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, following the astronomic success of her stadium show, The Eras Tour.
Trailing behind Swift for Stirling’s most popular artist were, to name a few: The 1975, Hozier, Noah Kahan, boygenius and ABBA. This mixed bag of artists tells us that Stirling Uni students enjoy their sad, autumnal, mellow music but also know when to let loose and unleash their inner dancing queen.
As for the rest of the United Kingdom, Taylor Swift still reigned supreme. However, Stirling did not share any similarities with other artists listed in the UK’s top five, which included Drake, The Weeknd, Arctic Monkeys and Ed Sheeran.
Streaming Time
This year, Stirling University spent an average 24,000 minutes listening to their tunes on Spotify. While this total may not reflect the time you’ve spent bingeing Taylor Swift’s back catalogue or mindlessly looping lo-fi study beats, it does speak to the outgoing student population of the University and shows that the busy student life often leaves little room to listen to music.
Top Songs
Stirling University’s list of top songs this year is much more varied than their top artists. Students streamed across all sorts of different genres, from classic-rock and hip hop to sad indie folk. Just to name a few of the tunes listed by students as their top songs: The 1975’s Sex and I Think There’s Something you Should Know; Noah Kahan’s Northern Attitude featuring Hozier; Jockstrap’s breakbeat banger 50/50; and an all-time classic I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing by Aerosmith.
While our favourite songs of the year differed in mood, genre and tempo, there is a recurring indie rock trend amongst the majority of tunes listed. Songs from bands like Radiohead, Wet Leg, The Strokes and The 1975 lined our listening habits this year. By comparison, Spotify notes that the UK’s top song choices this year were much more pop-focused: Sprinter by Dave and Central Cee; Flowers by Miley Cyrus; and Kill Bill by SZA. Once again, Stirling University students tend to enjoy grungier, moodier music than the rest of the country.
Music Map
This year’s wrapped introduced a brand-new feature: the music map. The map placed users in different locations across the globe based on which area their taste aligns with the most. The music map garned instant online popularity and, of course, produced several memes that kept us chained to Twitter and Instagram for hours.
Spotify users who compared their music maps with friends and people with similar taste quickly noted that Spotify was placing dozens of users in Berkeley, California for its tendencies towards electronic dance music and in Burlington, Vermont for its folky, acoustic musical preference.
Stirling University students, however, were the outlier of this phenomenon. The majority of us ended up being placed slightly closer to home in York, England. According to Spotify, people from York are more likely to stream acts like The Stone Roses, The 1975 and Sam Fender. Other areas students were placed included Bath, Santa Cruz and Cambridge.
Overall, there’s more to Stirling’s 2023 wrapped than meets the eye. Yes, we have an unhealthy obsession with Taylor Swift. But our preference towards the sound of acoustic guitars, whispering vocals and melancholic melodies shows that we are well-prepared for those cosy, winter months and that we love romanticising our dull UL trips to campus with music.
In celebration of Spotify Wrapped 2023, Brig Newspaper have curated a playlist tailored towards the tastes of Stirling University students, including our top songs of the year and other hits from our favourite artists. Listen here.
Featured Image Credit: Alexander Shatov on unsplash.com