Later this week, Spotify will be unveiling its personalized Wrapped stats. It’s a chance for Premium users to look back at the year that was and see which artists, songs, albums, genres, and podcasts captured their attention in 2019. Spotify has offered both a public and a personalized set of Wrapped stats in the past, but this year the company is expanding its view of the music and spoken-word world to an entire decade.
The Wrapped toolset, which also reveals facts like how many minutes of music you heard and how many songs you liked, has traditionally only been accessible via a custom website, making it a bit awkward to use. Last year, it required a bit of a hunt to find it. This year, however, Spotify is unlocking Wrapped’s potential as a social sharing opportunity: The Wrapped experience will also be available within the Spotify app itself, and share cards will be available for you to post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Beyond the annual opportunity to navel-gaze at our own music habits, Wrapped is an excellent opportunity to understand what the rest of the world is listening to. Given its massive global reach, Spotify is in a unique position to offer this perspective. Competing services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Google Play Music tend to have a much more U.S.-centric audience.
You might think this would reveal vast differences in how humans across the planet listen to music, but for the most part, the numbers reveal how we’re all heavily influenced by the strongest currents in music culture. Here’s a glimpse at the Wrapped stats for 2019, and the nine years that preceded it.
Top streamed artists of the decade
Top streamed tracks of the decade
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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