Something is up with Spotify Wrapped's new feature — it's telling way too many people they belong in Burlington, Vermont

• Spotify's 2023 Wrapped has a new feature that tells you which city shares your taste in music.
• A disproportionately high number of users are getting matched with Burlington, Vermont.
• Many users are putting out theories as to why.

Spotify's 2023 Wrapped has a new "Sound Town" feature that's supposed to match you with a city in the world that has musical tastes the most similar to yours. For a weirdly high number of users, that city happens to be Burlington, Vermont.

On the third slide of your Wrapped, Spotify shows you a city it's pinpointed for you on a map, giving three artists that both you and the people in that city are fans of.

Based on social media posts and Business Insider reporters who got Burlington as their Sound Town, some of the artists that people in Burlington are more likely to be fans of include the Grateful Dead, The Head and the Heart, Blood Orange, Vulfpeck, Father John Misty, and Fiona Apple.

People first started noticing the trend on social media — when everyone started posting their Spotify Wrapped, as is tradition — and thought it was a glitch on Spotify's end. But it turns out that Burlington is just representative of the listening habits of a disproportionately high number of Spotify users.

A Spotify spokesperson told the Business Insider that there are over 1,300 possible Sound Town locations. Of the platform's 574 million users, 0.6% were given Burlington as their Sound Town. That's around 3.4 million people — more than 75 times the population of Burlington itself, which has just under 45,000 people according to the most recent census.

"The Sound Town selected for each eligible user has the most similar taste profile to their own — based on their most streamed artists of the year and how those artists are streamed in cities across the globe," a Spotify representative told BI. "It is objective and entirely driven by a user's listening history."

Spotify itself even acknowledged the phenomenon on X, writing "hey besties" and tagging the accounts for Burlington, Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Of course, there are plenty of theories as to why this is the case.

"Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You In Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay," Queer outlet Them wrote, referencing how queer Spotify users seemed to be getting overwhelmingly assigned to Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge.

Berkeley was the Sound Town for 0.3% of all Spotify users, while 0.1% of users were assigned to Cambridge, Spotify told BI.

BI reporter Sebastian Cahill pointed out that many of Spotify's Sound Town cities are actually college towns — which could correlate with the generally lower age range of Spotify users.

"You just have the musical taste of a depressed liberal college student," Cahill writes.

There's at least one city that even more users are getting matched with than Burlington: San Luis Obispo, CA, to which 0.8% of users were assigned, Spotify told BI. But it doesn't seem to be getting the same amount of attention.