Hey Spotify, why the heck am I ‘Provo, Utah’?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Spotify Wrapped Season! Every year, the music streaming service collects its users’ listening data and presents them with fun little infographics about their most listened to artists and songs. Besides the standard stuff like your Top Artist (Taylor Swift for me) and Top Song of the Year (thanks to an association with an NPC in our D&D game, mine was Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”), Spotify likes to get a little quirky and come up with other categories, such as listening archetypes. This year one such category was ‘Sound Town’, which would tell you which city’s listening habits are most similar to yours.

And somehow I got Provo, Utah.

I mean no offense to the people who live in Provo, Utah, but what the hell? According to Spotify, this is because I listen to Taylor Swift, Mitski and Sleeping at Last. Okay, fine, maybe this particular combination is more common in Provo than the rest of the world. But when I look at other people’s “Sound Town” results, I wonder how Spotify calculated this, because people who also have Provo have tastes that seem completely different from mine.

For starters, the same handful of cities keep popping up (at least, judging by reports from my very US-centric social media feeds): Provo, Utah; Cambridge, MA; Davis, California; Berkeley, California; Bozeman, Montana; Boulder, Colo.; and perhaps most commonly, Burlington, Vermont. But it is not the case that these cities generate similar music tastes.

I’ve seen Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Fiona Apple, Death Grips and Boygenius all associated with Burlington as a Sound Town entry. Meanwhile, Provo is generating a string of Taylor Swift, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Weezer and The Strike. The artists are also not mutually exclusive for each city; I’ve seen Taylor almost everywhere.

It could be a genre thing. Many K-pop fans got Davis, and many people with “pop” as their top genre also got Provo. An official statement from Spotify says the Sound Town results are artist-based, but I know someone whose Provo assignment netted them three small indie bands, while I had Taylor Swift. People on Twitter keep joking that Burlington is “for gays” probably because of MUNA and boy genius, but as I poke around on social media I realize it’s also the Sound Town for a lot of Gen X Dad music.

For what it’s worth, this is what a Spotify rep told me:

The Sound Town selected for each eligible user will have the flavor profile most similar to its own — based on the most streamed artists of the year and how those artists are streamed in other cities around the world. It is objective and based entirely on a user’s listening history.

Is the sample section for a Sound Town label just three specific artists? How did Spotify choose That three, which aren’t even always from a listener’s top five groups? How many cities are even options? Is everyone in the United States doomed to have a city in this country?

My colleague Samit Sarkar pointed out that these were the most common Sound Towns Also major student cities. It could be that everyone I know has college student tastes. Spotify didn’t tell me how each of the cities was chosen as an option for the map, but it’s a strong theory. However, the follow-up question is Why?

I just do not know. People who I thought had the same taste in music as me keep sharing screenshots of Berkeley, Burlington, and Boulder, while I’ve been “objectively” assigned Provo. Another colleague of mine summed up the confusion best: “The only place I’ve been to in Burlington is the coat factory.”