Your 2021 Spotify Wrapped is finally here, and it’s one of the first attempts to create colorful cohesion out of a disjointed year.
According to Spotify, the theme for this year’s Wrapped is “the soundtrack to the new normal.” So what does that new normal look and sound like for the app’s estimated 400 million users around the world? Spotify is embracing the mercurial mood swings of 2021 with new features that will make you feel like the main character in your very own movie.
As per usual, starting today, Dec. 1, each Spotify user will get a personalized Wrapped experience that reveals their top songs and artists of the year, categorizing that data into interactive stories. But this year, the app is rolling out a host of new Wrapped features that help users better understand their listening habits while also capturing the zeitgeist.
Rolling out with Wrapped 2021 is a nontraditional approach and allows users to see their “Audio Aura.” Yes, your Audio Aura.
Rather than genre, the Your Audio Aura feature focuses on the mood of the music you listen to. Maybe you gravitate toward bold, confident tracks, or perhaps you rely on wistful and energetic sounds to get you through the day. With Your Audio Aura, Spotify — with the help of an aura expert — will “map the high-level moods of people’s listening into colors,” Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s Senior Director of Product for Personalization, revealed during a press preview of this year’s Wrapped on Nov. 30.
Credit: Spotify
Your customized Audio Aura is a vibrant visualization of your top two moods in 2021. Each Audio Aura is a combination of the auras, or colors, of that represent these moods. For example, if you went on a lot of hot girl walks this summer, then that confidence will be reflected in your Audio Aura as purple; meanwhile, wistfulness is blue. The combination of these two auras will appear as an ambient graphic that, of course, you can share on social media.
Auras capture energy. It’s a reflection of the energy emitting from your body at any given time, and to an aura reader, these energies are projected as colors. In order to make Your Audio Aura as accurate as possible, Spotify consulted aura experts.
Still, you may be thinking: How does the music you listen to influence your aura?
Music is the perfect vehicle for transporting an aura because music was created from an artist’s aura and mood.
“Every song creates a mood and that correlates to how auras work because people are moods,” Megan Michaela Firester, a celebrity psychic medium and aura reader known professionally as Mystic Michaela, told Mashable. “Music is the perfect vehicle for transporting an aura because music was created from an artist’s aura and mood.”
And according to Firester, it’s that connection between an artist’s aura and your own that makes Your Audio Aura even more transcendent. “You’re sitting in other artists’ auras and seeing how they speak to your own aura, and that’s the Audio Aura experience,” she added.
Aura reading is often seen as a way to read someone’s personality. People love to define themselves through the kinds of music they listen to. From the early days of MySpace to adding music to your Instagram Stories, sharing what’s on your playlist is the definitive way to show off your personal brand — to tell the world how you wish to be perceived. So correlating auras with music is an innovative way to meet Spotify users’ desire for their listening habits to define them.
The Audio Aura feature arrives amidst a year where spiritual practices such as Tarot card readings and manifestation have gained popularity on platforms like TikTok and Tumblr. Now, it’s Spotify’s turn.
SEE ALSO: Claiming tarot in the age of social media
Wrapped 2021 is also tapping into the “main character” trend with a “2021: The Movie” story feature that pairs your top songs with typical scenes from a movie — like the opening credits, the training montage, and the climactic dance-off. Finally, you can feel like the main character you were actually born to be.
Credit: Spotify
The audio “you have to start romanticizing your life / you have to start thinking of yourself as the main character” blew up on TikTok back in May 2020. Ever since, main character energy has been all over social media, with young people emboldening themselves to embrace their inner protagonist.
Spotify clocked this trend in March 2021 with the creation of their playlist “my life is a movie” which has over 860,000 likes. The description of the playlist reads “every main character needs their soundtrack.” So it makes sense that Spotify Wrapped is giving users the ability to curate the soundtracks of their lives with the “2021: The Movie” feature.
This year’s Wrapped will also feature a data-driven two truths and a lie card game you can play to see how well you truly know yourself and what you listened to this year. You can then share these cards with friends and see how well they know you. Another integration you can do with friends? The introduction of Wrapped Blend, the year-end take on the app’s Blend playlists that combine your top songs with a friend’s.
Now, you can see how well your 2021 tastes really match up.
Credit: Spotify
2021 is also the first year you can share your personalized Wrapped card directly to TikTok, so prepare for your FYPs to be inundated with peoples’ top songs, most-played artists, and Audio Auras.
To access your Spotify Wrapped all you need to do is open the Spotify App on your mobile device.