From Burlington to San Luis Obispo, Spotify users react to Wrapped 2023 ‘sound towns’

Spotify says ‘sound towns’ highlight cities with similar ‘taste profiles’

Spotify Wrapped is back, but this time around, it’s showing listeners where their taste in music took them with “sound towns”.

The yearly Spotify tradition typically features a bundle of Instagram Story-friendly statistics that show the platform’s 574 million users their most-listened artists, songs, and podcasts. In the latest iteration for 2023, the platform has assigned users “sound towns”.

In the vein of the Spotify feature that ordinarily allows users to see which five cities their favourite artists have the most listeners, this new addition to Spotify Wrapped assigns users all over the world oddly specific “sound towns,” cities that are assigned to you based on your affinity for certain songs and artists in 2023.

In a press release, Spotify said that the “sound towns” highlight “the city that has the most similar taste profile to yours”.

To find your “sound town,” you must tap on the third slide of your Spotify Wrapped to reveal your results, and there you can easily share your “sound town” directly to the social media platform of your choice.

Users are taking to social media to dissect what their “sound town” means and what Spotify is trying to say about them by assigning them with places like Burlington, Vermont, and San Luis Obispo, California.

“Spotify Wrapped 2023, brought to you by the Burlington, VT Board of Tourism,” someone joked on X, formerly known as Twitter. Another wrote above a meme of teenagers from the 2014 Tumblr era, “Burlington USA, according to Spotify Wrapped.”

Burlington has notably been assigned to many who listen to indie and folk artists, such as Hozier and boygenius. These artists tend to not only have a huge indie following, but also a large LGBTQ+ fan base.

According to some users, it’s not just Burlington that has a concentration of LGBTQ+ people who listen to indie music, but also Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. One person joked on X: “Spotify is trying to make a gay commune in Berkeley, a lesbian commune in Burlington, and a bisexual commune in Cambridge.”

Meanwhile, an overwhelming amount of users shared that they got San Luis Obispo because they listened to popular indie artists like Tyler the Creator, beabadobee, and Mac Demarco. “Berkeley, CA this. Burlington, VT that. The real b*****s are getting San Luis Obispo, CA for their Spotify Wrapped,” someone wrote on X.

“Any hot people in San Luis Obispo? SPEAK UP,” one person quipped, while another added: “The real ones are getting San Luis Obispo on their Spotify Wrapped btw.”

With users happily sharing their Spotify Wrapped locales, it seems like Spotify has upped the ante with this latest feature, poised to make a splash on social media. Spotify head of global marketing experience, Louisa Ferguson, said that this year’s Spotify Wrapped was inspired by the “chaos” of the internet.

“Every year, it feels like the world is moving faster,” she explained. “The internet is converging with real life. There’s something about this past year that felt especially chaotic with regards to how people consumed culture. We really wanted to acknowledge that feeling because it felt very accurate to 2023.”

The personalised Spotify Wrapped roundup for 2023 is now available as of 29 November.