Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped dropped on 3 December 2025. Users can access their personalised annual recap via the app’s home screen (or desktop), where they’ll see top artists, songs, albums, genres — and some fresh additions.
Among the new features: a “Top Song Quiz”, in which users guess their most-listened track of the year. There’s also a Fan Leaderboard (ranking heavy listeners), album and audiobook stats, and the usual playlists compiling your top tracks of 2025.
But the biggest shake-up — and the thing lots of people are sharing (for better or worse) — is the new:
“Listening Age”
Spotify now shows you a “Listening Age,” a playful estimate based on the music you’ve consumed this year. Rather than using your real birth-date, your Listening Age is calculated using the ‘Reminiscence Bump’ – a psychological tendency for people to gravitate towards the music from their youth.
For example: if you listened mostly to music from the late 1970s, Spotify might label you as 63 — because someone born in 1978 (for example) would have been 16–21 then. To be eligible for a “listening age,” your account needs a reported date of birth (1925 or later) and you must have at least five streams in that five-year release window.
In the UK and beyond, social media quickly flooded with examples of wildly inaccurate “listening ages.” Some Gen Z users ended up with ages in their 60s or 70s based on a love of classic rock, soul, or jazz. Others older than 50 found themselves pegged in their 20s — because their playlists leaned heavily on recent hits.
There’s a mixture of amusement, disbelief, and frustration. One writer — 44 in real life — got a listening age of 86, despite heavy listening to young-pop star Sabrina Carpenter. Their “top 3 per cent globally” status as a fan didn’t prevent Spotify from slapping them with a septuagenarian age.
Some people are laughing it off, turning the odd results into jokes and memes; others — especially younger users — feel mis-represented or mocked.
The logic behind it is interesting, but applying it to everyone’s listening is bound to be messy. Because people nowadays listen to a wide variety of music across decades, the “Listening Age” often ends up wildly inaccurate or contradictory to actual age. As many have voiced: music taste isn’t a reliable age indicator.
In that light, the feature seems more like a playful conversation starter — something designed to spark memes and social sharing — rather than a meaningful metric.
Wrapped 2025 — including Listening Age — is available in the UK now. If your app is updated, just open it to see the new features.
Expect surprises. Will you end up labelled a “young soul” or a “nostalgic grandpa?
If you want something more reflective of real listening habits — hours played, most-listened artists, favourite genres — those stats are unaffected by the quirks of “Listening Age.”
And in case you’re interested … my Listening Age: 22