Want to know your 'listening age'? A new Spotify feature can tell you

Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming platform’s annual summation of user listening habits presents data on most listened-to songs and artists. The feature of this year’s report that has become the talk of the town is the inclusion of the listener’s so-called “listening age.”

After discovering their assigned ages, many users have taken to social media, expressing a mix of reactions.

Here in Canada, two prominent politicians, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman had some fun with their Spotify ages.

In an Instagram post , Carney proclaimed “44,” with a grin, when a reporter asked him: “What’s your age?” His actual age is 60.

Lantsman posted her Spotify age of 23, writing in an X post: “Late-stage Millennial by birth, Gen Z cusp by playlist.” She is 41.

Late-stage Millennial by birth, Gen Z cusp by playlist. And yes, I love my @Spotify year-end stats. pic.twitter.com/QOajUgiaLd

— Melissa Lantsman (@MelissaLantsman) December 4, 2025

Some users are similarly wearing their ages like a badge of honour, while others who skewed much younger, blamed their children’s taste, reports the New York Times.

Tabulating “listening age” for users follows in the Spotify tradition of issuing annual data, aimed at getting users to share the results on social media and engage in conversation about it. In 2023, notes the Times, Spotify placed listeners in cities around the world based on their musical taste.

The annual tradition, now 10 years old, reviews listeners listening habits , reports NPR, including statements about their top artists, albums and genres.

In a Spotify webpage explaining its process , the company says “listening age” is based on the notion of “reminiscence bump,” which it describes as the tendency for people to feel most connected to music from their youth.

Research shows, says NPR , that adults’ brains especially hold onto memories from their teenage years, especially when it comes to music. Spotify says it combs through a listener’s songs to identify the “five-year span of music that you engaged with more than other listeners your age.” It hypothesizes that this five-year window matches a listener’s “reminiscence bump,” assuming they were between 16 and 21 when those songs came out.

“For example,” states the Spotify webpage, “if you listen to way more music from the late 1970s than others your age, we playfully hypothesize that your ‘listening’ age is 63 today, the age of someone who would have been in their formative years in the late 1970s.”

Meanwhile, Spotify released data on the top artists of 2025 . Bad Bunny was 2025’s most-streamed artist globally, chalking up more than 19.8 billion streams. He is followed by Taylor Swift, Canadians The Weeknd and Drake, as well as Billie Eilish, in that order. For the past two years, Swift commanded the top spot globally. Bad Bunny held the coveted title for three years in a row beginning in 2020, and now, he’s back on top.

The top five streamed artists in Canada in 2025 were Drake, Taylor Swift, Morgen Wallen, The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar.

Spotify collects listening data from Jan. 1 through around mid-November. That gives the company time to deliver its recap to users by early December. But it also means your favourite holiday songs aren’t on the list, or any other year-end hits.

According to Spotify, users must listen to at least 30 tracks for more than 30 seconds each to get top songs. For artists, users need to listen to at least five unique artists for more than 30 seconds. And for top album, users need to have listened to at least 70 per cent of the tracks on one album.

Like every year, there are a few new features. Those include the introduction of “Top Albums,” a fan leaderboard to show users where they stack up in an artist’s streams. There is also something called “Wrapped Party,” an interactive feature that allows users to compare their Wrapped with other Spotify users.

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