The digest, which shows listeners their most played songs and artists, along with other surprises, is one of the company’s key marketing efforts. This year Spotify added a new feature called “Sound Town”. A feature that matches users to a city where residents share their music taste.
According to Spotify, the feature was created to show how listening habits are shared between different communities. The assigned city for each listener “has the taste profile most similar to their own and “is objective and entirely driven by a user’s listening history,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement, according to Washington Post.
However, the new feature has caused quite a stir on social media. Many flagged their sound cities and wondered if they were correct, something that several international media also reported on.
Got Linköping as a city on “Spotify Wrapped”
There are more than 1,300 possibilities among the “sound cities”. Sweden’s fifth largest city Linköping, with approximately 163,000 inhabitants, is one of them.
Many, even users outside Sweden’s borders, therefore got Linköping as their sound city when the summary rolled out. Something that has left many wondering.
TV4 Nyheterna has published a video on the social media platform TikTok, which has already received over 2,000 comments and many are engaging with the topic.
“Why Linköping in particular. Feels extremely strange,” writes one account.
“Everyone I know got Örebro or Linköping,” writes another.
The majority of accounts write that they received Linköping as the assigned city. Others also write that they “got a small town in the USA”.
Even smaller cities in the US
On social media platforms, some users have noted the lack of major cities in the Spotify results. In the US, three random cities have also appeared in the conversation. Burlington, Cambridge and Berkeley.
Cambridge, a city located in the state of Massachusetts, and Berkeley, located in the state of California, each have roughly 177,000 inhabitants. For fans who appreciate listening to indie rock artists, the city of Burlington, Vermont was unusually popular, especially since the city only has a population of about 44,000.
Speculation about promoting tourism
People on social media are now talking about how so many have been assigned to the cities. Oddly enough, so popular that speculation surrounds whether Spotify is partnering with local authorities to promote tourism.
Spotify’s official X account, formerly Twitter, did too a post which dilutes the speculation.
In the post, they referenced the cities of Berkelet, Burlington and Cambridge by tagging the cities’ official X accounts and writing “hello besties”. The City of Cambridge account responded to the post with “hey bestie”.
TV4 Nyheterna has tried to get in touch with Spotify.