CGS Wrapped
By Barrett Burnham ‘23 and Oscar Goranson ‘24
Image by Oscar Goranson
At the end of every calendar year, music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music offer music wrap-ups for their users. These wrap-ups provide a summary of the user's listening habits over the past year, including the top songs, artists, and genres they listened to.
The rise of streaming services in the late 2000s marked a significant shift in the way people listened to music. Spotify, which launched in 2008, pioneered the concept for end-of-year wrap-ups, starting with their “Year of Music” in 2015. The idea continued to be workshopped until 2017 when they decided to use a style similar to an Instagram or Snapchat story.
This wrapped feature, along with Spotify’s top-of-class music algorithms, propelled the platform to the forefront of music streaming services. June Sauvaget, Spotify’s head of consumer and product marketing, said Spotify Wrapped “creates this FOMO (fear of missing out) effect that happens and that inherently entices new users to consider Spotify”.
Since then, other streaming services such as Apple Music and Youtube Music have attempted to capture the same magic, offering their own wrap-ups to users at the end of each year.
Today, year-end wrap-ups are a popular feature among music streaming users. In addition to showing users their top songs and artists, these wrap-ups often include interactive features like playlists. Some streaming services even allow users to share their wrap-ups on social media, allowing them to compare their listening habits with those of their friends.
As technology has advanced and more people have turned to streaming services to listen to music, these wrap-ups have become an increasingly popular way for users to reflect on their listening habits and discover new music.
Now, much like other companies, CGS is making our own end-of-year wrapped.
To do this, we surveyed the students here at CGS to get a sense of their listening habits and preferences in music. In order to do this, students and faculty submitted their top artists, songs, genres, and minutes of music listened to from the year.
Here at CGS, we have a musically diverse student body, and the results of our survey proved that. Here we have the 2022 Catlin Gabel Wrapped:
YOU MUST OPEN THE LINK BELOW
Unpacking the Results
Our results were very uniquely Catlin. We had a large spread of genres, artists, and songs listened to by the community, but there were some interesting trends that arose from the data.
There were 25 unique top genres amongst the CGS community, ranging from Lofi beats to Cottagecore, but the most popular responses were pop, rap, and rock. This makes sense, as there are many more songs that fit these broader genres than the more specific ones.
Many even had specific preferences within their genres. For example, when asked about his go-to genre for the year, senior Gabe Korngold (‘23) said that he enjoyed “Chill rap songs with lyrics that are inventive and insightful.”
Next, much like the genres, there was a unique variety of artists listened to at CGS. Taylor Swift was the most popular artist submitted, followed by Kanye West, Tyler the Creator, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar.
Some may be surprised by the inclusion of Kanye West as one of the most popular artists, seeing as he has been very controversial as of late. CGS student Owen Caughey (‘25) was surprised by the inclusion of Kanye West in his end-of-year wrap-up, stating that he “started disliking him more and more, but I guess I must have listened to a lot of him at the start of the year.”
The item with the most variety was definitely the songs at the end of the day. Out of 85 responses, there was only one song that multiple people said was their top song, and it was the song I Ain’t Worried by One Republic.
Outside of that one song though, each response brought a unique top song to the response board, showing just how unique CGS can be. Our top songs can’t be captured in a top 5 list, so we made a playlist. This playlist has every top song that was submitted, and it does a pretty good job of capturing the variety of our community.
Outside of the songs on the playlists, a few members of our community also had some personal recommendations that they shared.
Cole Grant ‘23: “The album Song of Her's by the band Her's is fantastic”
Owen Caughey ‘25: “Objects in the Mirror by Mac Miller was one of my most listened-to songs, and for good reason. It is not nearly one of his most listened-to songs, but it is my favorite and one of my favorite songs of all time. That song deserves much more recognition.”
Gabe Korngold ‘23: “[The album] Melt My Eyez See Your Future by Denzel Curry. The melodic production is amazing and the lyrics are just as good. It’s a really enjoyable album that I keep listening to over and over again.”
Adrian Cisowski ‘24: “[bsd.u] deserves much more attention”