By now, your TikTok For You Page and Instagram Stories have been flooded with people sharing their Spotify Wrapped data — the usual rundown of top artists, songs, and genres. But this year, Spotify added a playful twist that has taken over the discourse: a new “Listening Age” function, which assigns users an age based on the music they consumed in 2025.
“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally,” the Spotify slide warns, before revealing each user’s calculated listening age.
How exactly did Spotify land on that number, though? Marc Hazan, Spotify’s SVP of Marketing and Partnerships, says the company’s creatives, editors, and data scientists built the Listening Age metric around the concept of a “reminiscence bump,” a person’s tendency to gravitate toward music released during their youth.
To get there, the streaming platform analyzed the release dates of every track a person streamed this year, identified the five-year span where their listening was most concentrated relative to other listeners their actual age, and then hypothesized what that span would suggest if the user were in their late teens or early adulthood when that music first came out.
For this reporter (hi, me, Tomás Mier), Wrapped landed on a listening age of 30 — not far off from my actual age of 27 — because I was “into music from the early 2010s.” For someone who listened to a lot of music from the Seventies, though, Spotify hypothesized that their formative years would’ve been around that time, landing them around a listening age of 63.
We polled the Rolling Stone staff on their listening ages — and the results were pure chaos. One social editor clocked in at 21, another 78. The youngest was 17, while one of our editors-in-chief landed at a wise 71. Even some of our youngest staffers were “listening like” forty-somethings or septuagenarians. The average listening age of our newsroom? A very respectable 55 years old.
“What inspired the idea for Listening Age was the insight that Gen Z and Gen Alpha users are more likely to listen to music across different genres and decades than previous users,” Hazan tells Rolling Stone. “So, we thought it would be fun to ‘age’ listeners based solely on their music taste — whether that means you listen like a 17-year-old, or like an 85-year-old.”
On X, several Listening Age-related posts and memes quickly went viral, poking fun at what the listening age might actually mean about those with ages far off from their real age.
One post with nearly four million views read, “her spotify listening age was 19 you sick fuck.”
Another read, “I think if your listening age on spotify wrapped is older than your actual age it’s cool and good and it makes you intelligent and interesting. if your listening age is below your actual age you need a psychiatric evaluation to understand why you’re the way that you are.”
Another joked, “spotify listening age gap relationship.”
Even some stars jumped in on the Listening Age chaos. Karol G clocked in at 51 thanks to her love of early Nineties music. Gracie Abrams landed at 73 because she’d been deep into the late Sixties. And Charli XCX? Her listening age came in at 75. So Brat!
“Listening Data does what wrapped does best – turns listening habits into conversation. Everyone responds to their Listening Age differently,” Hazan says. “Some love discovering they skew ‘old,’ others laugh or cringe at being unexpectedly ‘young.’ The point is to spark conversation and give people space to see themselves through their own lens.”
Hazan says that the Listening Age feature has been an “early standout” hit from their Wrapped data this year, which Spotify revealed was their biggest yet, reaching 200 million users and more than 500 million shares in just the first 24 hours. Yesterday, the platform also shared its year-end data, revealing that Bad Bunny was the biggest artist of 2025 globally with 19.8 billion streams.
