By now, your TikTok For You Page and Instagram Stories have been flooded with people sharing their Spotify Wrapped data – the usual rundown of top artists, songs, and genres.But this year, Spotify added a playful twist that has taken over the discourse: a new “Listening Age” function, which assigns users an age based on the music they consumed in 2025.”Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally,” the Spotify slide warns,before revealing each user’s calculated listening age.
how exactly did Spotify land on that number, though? Marc Hazan, Spotify’s SVP of Marketing and Partnerships, says the company’s creatives, editors, and data scientists built the Listening Age metric around the concept of a “reminiscence bump,” a person’s tendency to gravitate toward music released during their youth.
To get there, the streaming platform analyzed the release dates of every track a person streamed this year, identified the five-year span where their listening was most concentrated relative to other listeners their actual age, and then hypothesized what that span would suggest if the user where in their late teens or early adulthood when that music first came out.
For this reporter (hi, me, Tomás Mier), Wrapped landed on a listening age of 30 – not far off from my actual age of 27 – because I was “into music from the early 2010s.” For someone who listened to a lot of music from the Seventies, though, Spotify hypothesized that their formative years would’ve been around that time, landing them around a listening age of 63.We polled the Rolling Stone staff on their listening ages – and the results were pure chaos. One social editor clocked in at 21, another 78. The youngest was 17, while one of our editors-in-chief landed at a wise 71. Even some of our youngest staffers were “listening like” forty-somethings or septuagenarians. The average listening age of our newsroom? A very respectable 55 years old.
Spotify’s “Listening Age” Feature Sparks Viral Conversation and Reveals 2025’s Top Artist
Spotify’s year-end Wrapped data release has once again captivated users, but this year a new feature – “Listening Age” – has gone especially viral, sparking humorous self-reflection and online debate.The feature assigns users an age based on the music they listen to, and the reactions have been widespread.
One popular post circulating on social media, shared here, jokingly suggested that a higher “Listening age” indicates intelligence and sophistication, while a lower age warrants a “psychiatric evaluation.” Others have playfully dubbed the phenomenon a “listening age gap relationship.”
the trend has even caught the attention of musicians. Karol G’s Listening Age clocked in at 51, attributed to her fondness for early 1990s music. Gracie Abrams received a Listening age of 73, influenced by her preference for late 1960s tracks. Charli XCX’s age was reported as 75.
According to Spotify’s Head of Music Trends, cortney Hazan, the feature is designed to encourage self-expression and conversation.”Listening Data does what Wrapped does best – turns listening habits into conversation.Everyone responds to their Listening Age differently,” Hazan explained. “Some love discovering they skew ‘old,’ others laugh or cringe at being unexpectedly ‘young.’ The point is to spark conversation and give people space to see themselves through their own lens.”
The “Listening Age” feature has proven to be a significant success, contributing to Spotify’s biggest Wrapped release yet. The platform reported reaching 200 million users and exceeding 500 million shares within the first 24 hours. Spotify also revealed its overall year-end data, announcing that Bad Bunny was the most-streamed artist globally in 2025, amassing 19.8 billion streams.