How does Spotify Wrapped work? Do stats include November and December - when does it start and stop tracking

The annual Spotify Wrapped has been released once again on Wednesday (30 November), revealing users’ year-in-review playlist including what songs they have been listening to over the past year.

The music app’s annual ‘Wrapped’ revelation shows users various data points of who their favourite artist has been over the past year to how much they listened to them.

It also shows how close someone might be to being a superfan, and gives artists a glimpse of the number of streams they received, number of listeners and how many countries listeners were located in for the past year.

But, how does Spotify Wrapped actually work, and when does it start and stop tracking your music listening habits?

Here is everything you need to know.

How does Spotify Wrapped work?

Spotify gathers data from users - anyone who has created a Spotify account, listened to at least five different artists and at least 30 different songs.

Streams are only counted if a user listens to a song for at least 30 seconds. For those users who listen to downloaded tracks and playlists offline, these are counted the next time they go online.

In 2020, some reports stated that only those who joined Spotify before 15 November 2019 were eligible for the lists coming out in December 2020. However, no information is available if any such date of joining is an eligibility criterion for this year.

The list is compiled through a combination of the number of plays and the unique number of days someone listened to it.

The top five songs and top five artists are compiled through play count. For the top 100 playlist, artist separation is used after track ten, so it is not a direct reflection of the play count, as per the website.

When does it start and stop tracking?

The tracking period always starts on 1 January and ends on 31 October - giving Spotify the time to put together all the results in time for December.

This means that none of the November and December listening habits are ever included. The analysis is based on just 10 months, and not the entire year.

On how accurate the results are, Spotify remains tight-lipped on how it calculates them and whether or not any streams get left out. So a portion of your listening habits could be missing.

Over the years, many have expressed their surprise when the app revealed the songs, artists or genres they had listened to most often.