Asking a music streaming service to tell you what song you played initially has a subtle humorous quality, similar to asking an old acquaintance to recall what you ordered when you first met for coffee. After being a part of hundreds of millions of people’s lives for almost twenty years, Spotify has finally released a function that enables you to do just that. The feature, known as Spotify 20, is advertised under the somewhat pretentious moniker “Your Party of the Year(s),” and it appears almost too prominently on the mobile app’s home screen. The majority of folks I’ve questioned about it haven’t noticed it yet. They often spend a surprising amount of time scrolling after they tap in.
Opening the Spotify app on your phone, making sure it is the most recent version, and tapping the search symbol is the quickest way to locate your first music. Enter “Party of the Year,” “Spotify 20,” or “My First Plays.” The interactive element should appear when you use any of those three search phrases. After that, the experience is constructed similarly to those Spotify Wrapped year-end summaries that are now a yearly social media cultural tradition, but this one covers the whole history of your account. Your exact account start date, the total number of unique songs you have streamed, your all-time most-played artist, and, finally, your first streamed track—the most intimate piece of information of all—are all displayed as the cards swipe through a series.
Spotify has also made the more conventional method available for anyone whose accounts predate the feature’s data range or for anyone who just so happens to be on a device where the in-app version isn’t showing up. You can use a web browser to log into the Spotify Account site, select Privacy and Safety from the menu on the left, and then scroll down to the section titled “Download your data.” To obtain the extended streaming history, choose both choices.
Depending on how many requests they are processing that week, the company will usually email a ZIP file to your registered address in a few days. The complete timeline is contained in the JSON files called “endsong” or “StreamingHistory” whenever it comes. Your first song is the earliest entry when you sort by date.
This type of functionality really intrigues me because it makes something that most people would never bother to track apparent. For the most of the 20th century, listening to music was a literally forgotten activity. You had a few cassettes, listened to the radio, played records, and finally accumulated a CD collection. Your personal memory was the only place where the songs you played first, most, or last were recorded. That was subtly altered by streaming. Without the user’s active involvement, each Spotify account is essentially a multi-year diary of taste. The journal becomes readable when you use the Spotify 20 option.
People find the feature emotionally compelling because of its personal component. My personal experience with it is very normal. On September 21, 2020, Van Halen’s “Atomic Punk” was the first song I streamed on my current Spotify account. I remember that time period in very particular ways. I moved into a new apartment during the peculiar Covid housing market, when prices in some neighborhoods momentarily plummeted and many like me ended up with leases we would not have been able to afford. In hindsight, the Van Halen decision makes sense. I was opening boxes. I heard the song in my brain and played it. A tiny window back to that summer is opened by that one data point.
My account’s metrics reveal a somewhat humiliating tale of their own. 5,377 distinct songs were streamed. With 1,781 minutes of listening time, AC/DC is the most heard artist overall. The function automatically creates an All-Time Top Songs playlist with 120 songs arranged by play count. The list is filled with songs that I haven’t given any mind to in months but seem to keep coming back to in the background. I can’t recall adding some of these. I was certain that I had stopped listening to some of these songs years ago. The playlist functions as an inadvertent self-portrait. It’s clear that the version of myself that really skips songs on Spotify differs slightly from the version of myself that I describe in conversation when asked about my musical preferences.
This raises more general concerns about the amount of personal information already stored on the main platforms and the actual benefits of allowing users to view it. The majority of data-disclosure features developed by tech businesses are defensive in nature, created to adhere to state-level requirements in the United States or the European GDPR. Spotify’s version is unique in that, instead of merely offering a raw export, the firm has actually created a user experience around the underlying data. In contrast to the standard privacy dashboard, the outcome feels helpful.