Sebastian Cahill / Insider
- Spotify Wrapped day is one of the most exciting holidays of the year.
- Lots of users were baffled by one section — the city that supposedly matched their listening habits.
- From Berkeley to Mexico City, we're looking at the one thing that could connect the cities you get.
Ah, Spotify Wrapped. One of the most exciting — or most dread-inducing, for those of you whose music taste isn't quite as cool as you'd like to pretend — days of the year.
In between screenshotting your top genres and comparing your top five songs, you might have noticed that you got another, new metric — a "place that listened just like you."
While some people seemed pleased with their results, others seemed confused.
"Mine was provo," my friend reported in our group chat this morning. "Where tf is provo?"
Most of my friends and I got Burlington, Vermont, which we didn't think much of, until the outlet them posted that it was actually one of the three gayest cities to get on your Wrapped.
"ok, but then why is everyone's location in burlington??" I texted, thinking Spotify's assignments were random and flawed, until my friends reminded me we were, all in fact, queer as a wallet full of three-dollar bills.
Fair enough.
But enough about my foolish group texting exploits. The real interest here is that many cities that seem to be popularly assigned have one thing in common, as noted by an anonymous Business Insider editor who happened to have the musical tastes of a Madison, Wisconsin indie rock fan.
They're all college towns.
Provo, Utah, is home to Brigham Young University; the University of Vermont is in Burlington; Berkeley, California, is home to the University of California, at, you guessed it, Berkeley; Cambridge, Massachusetts, holds more universities and colleges than you can count.
Other people I spoke to were placed in more college towns —Madison, Wisconsin; San Luis Obispo, and Davis, California; I could go across the entire country.
And, as always, people online had a bunch of opinions about what your college town said about you.
"Everyone complaining about getting Provo in their spotify wrapped needs to just accept the fact that they have terrible taste in music," said one commentator.
"going to college in Davis and waking up seeing everyone bashing it because they got it on their spotify wrapped is so funny," said another X user.
Other people theorized that the frequency of college towns being picked was due to the generally lower age range of Spotify users.
Whatever it is, it looks like most of us just need to accept that whether we're 19 or 43, we still have the same musical tastes as depressed liberal arts college students praying to make it through the week.
Happy listening!