Spotify Wrapped Says My Listening Age Is 79 – and One Coworker’s Is 100

Spotify Wrapped is a fun annual roundup of your listening habits. Every year, the music streaming app adds new features, like back in 2023, when it assigned people a Sound Town, meaning a city that supposedly matched their listening style. The Spotify Wrapped for 2025 just landed on Wednesday, and new features this year include a multiplayer game called Wrapped Party and an in-your-face assessment of your listening age.

That last one blew my mind a little. My actual age is 57. According to Spotify, my listening age is 79.

SEVENTY-NINE.

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President Donald Trump and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are 79. Liza Minnelli is 79. Cher — well, she’s ageless, but technically, she’s 79.

Look, I’m no teenybopper, I get it. I’m a proud Atari Wave Gen Xer. So it’s not like I was 18 and was then told I was listening to AARP tunes. But does Spotify realize how it sounds to be hit with a listening age that’s 22 years older than I really am?

What’s my age again?

I’m not the only one Spotify is aging up. My 18-year-old daughter was told she was 37, maybe because of her love of 1990s emo. Some people get aged down — my colleague Corinne Reichert’s 73-year-old mom was labeled 21. (“She listens to a lot of K-pop,” her daughter says.)

Spotify pegged my colleague Jon Skillings as an octogenarian, with a listening age of 86, “since you were into music from the late ’50s.” 

Blame that on his passion for jazz and a healthy dose of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in his sonic excursions. At least Spotify had the good taste to play Count Basie’s 1957 version of April in Paris when it delivered the news.

“I won’t lie. That 86 did sting a little,” Skillings says. “I really thought I was mixing in a lot more tunes from this century.”

For the record, Spotify did flag a 2024 release from the contemporary jazz pianist Vijay Iyer as his top album. 

“See?” he says. “I can keep up with the times.”

But Skillings looks like a spring chicken next to CNET’s Ty Pendlebury, who wrote our main Spotify Wrapped article and revealed that Spotify bluntly told him he was 100.

I may be old, but I got to see all the cool bands

Spotify claims my listening age is 79, not because I sit around watching Lawrence Welk Show reruns, but because I “was into music from the early ’60s.” 

According to Business Insider, Spotify looks at the release year of all the songs you listened to this year, and finds an era’s music that you listened to more than other people your actual age.  The site assumes that people like music that came out when they were 16 to 21. (Welcome to my Prince, REM and The Smiths era.)

I think my Spotify musical age has a lot to do with me watching the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and suddenly deciding Spotify was the perfect way to catch up on Dylan’s music. I was just a little too early for his heyday, although I lived just off the famous Highway 61, where God said to Abraham, kill me a son. OK, so I saw the movie, and I mainlined me some Dylan on Spotify.

So why not hand me a decade instead of an age? I was born in the ’60s, so dubbing me a ’60s baby would be just fine by me. (My birth year is 6-7, which should be a popular year with Gen Z and Alpha.) I grew into my musical tastes in Minneapolis in the 1980s, with Prince, The Replacements, Husker Du and The Suburbs, so call me an ’80s child and I will put that sucker on a T-shirt and flaunt it. 

I’ve decided I’m going to wear my Spotify age proudly. Nobody should be shoved into a musical pigeonhole; there are great tunes from every decade, if you’re open enough to listen, and an 80-year-old can listen to whoever they choose. I’m proud that my musical tastes aren’t narrowly defined by my birth year, but instead, are open and vast. 

So you’ll excuse me if I look at Spotify calling me 79 and quote an iconic song from those Gen X gurus, Nirvana:

Oh well, whatever, never mind.