‘Tis the season for waking up to find a Spotify Wrapped waiting for us on our phones. We swipe through each stat, watch personalized thank you messages from our top artists, and share the overview to our social media. Rinse and repeat with YouTube Recaps. It’s a tradition, one that I follow loyally as a data nerd. But every time, it fails to satisfy my itch.
Why, you ask? Well, the truth is, I don’t seek out specific songs when I listen on Spotify. I enable shuffle on my yearly mega-playlist and let fate decide. To make sure I’m not listening to the same songs, I will deliberately play a recent song first but leave shuffle enabled on my playlist. As a result, songs that are added earlier in the year get played the most. Don’t get me wrong, I love new jack swing, but “Love Potion” by n.SSign is probably not my SOTY.
Is it any different with YouTube Recaps? Unlike on Spotify, I do seek out specific songs on YouTube. However, there’s a different problem. You see, in order to rank my favourite songs from the previous year, I have to listen to those songs repeatedly until I get sick of them. Even worse, the songs that are ranked lower tend to be in heavy rotation. And that’s how songs from 2024 end up on my 2025 YouTube Recap.
These reflections on my year in music don’t feel like they reflect me. As Troy Bolton would put it, “It’s no good at all to see yourself and not recognize your face.” So I’m here to write my own 2025 music retrospective. Or just kill time before my Last.fm Playback arrives.
Group 1: Prescribed Listening
I don’t think anyone else forces themselves to listen to music like I do. Sure, my teachers recommend artists so I can study how they craft songs, but I also assign myself listening homework (like a lunatic). I have an ongoing project called “Curing My Classic-itis” where I check out artists I’ve heard about but never listened to before. I get the list of artists from Mic The Snare (highly recommend his videos).
Besides the big names in the music industry, I miss keeping a lookout for the smaller names. I used to rely on music channels to curate hour-long blocks of music videos. These days, I check music publications that make playlists of local or underground artists. I read the articles and pick a few songs to check out every Friday.
Group 2: Playlist Additions
If you’ve been following my music retrospective, you know that I’m trying to build playlists of songs grouped by year. I have completely caught up with Eurovision from 2017 onwards, I am currently catching up on 2021 pop music, and I am looking back at 2014 kpop while also keeping track of kpop from this year.
I’ll be honest, my 2025 kpop playlist is looking a little slim. At first, I thought maybe kpop was having an off year. But then, after reviewing the numbers, I noticed an anomaly. My playlist additions decreased significantly in the second half of the year, and I think I know why. You see, I’m gearing up to graduate next year and have had a lot of responsibilities dumped on me. So I guess running around like my hair’s on fire did not put me in the mood to discover new music. Still, that doesn’t mean 2025 has been a complete dud.
Group 3: Old Favourites
This year felt like a renaissance for my favourite pop artists. Ariana Grande was amazing in Wicked: For Good and released a reissue of eternal sunshine. Calum Hood and Michael Clifford of 5 Seconds of Summer made their solo debuts and the band came out with a new album in November. Demi Lovato released a “not that deep” dance pop album and got married. And of course, Taylor Swift released her 12th album and got engaged. Honourable mention goes to Marianas Trench because I still bump the 5+ minute long tracks from Haven and the frontman, Josh Ramsay, did such a spectacular cover of “Defying Gravity” that fans begged him to release it on streaming platforms.
If 2025 has taught me anything, it’s that the Internet is what you make of it. It’s vast and chaotic, but you don’t need to swallow it all. I think it falls on all of us to carve out places where we feel comfortable as well as make space for curiosity, all while doing our best to leap over the pits of negativity. For me, that meant spending less time doomscrolling on Instagram and curating the news I wanted to see. If this retrospective is any indication, I think I did pretty good, and I want to see if I can do better next year.