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\n\tBy now, your TikTok For You Page and Instagram Stories have been flooded with people sharing their Spotify Wrapped data <\/a>\u2014 the usual rundown of top artists, songs, and genres. But this year, Spotify<\/a> added a playful twist that has taken over the discourse: a new \u201cListening Age\u201d function, which assigns users an age based on the music they consumed in 2025.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAge is just a number. So don\u2019t take this personally,\u201d the Spotify slide warns, before revealing each user\u2019s calculated listening age.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHow exactly did Spotify land on that number, though? Marc Hazan, Spotify\u2019s SVP of Marketing and Partnerships, says the company\u2019s creatives, editors, and data scientists built the Listening Age metric around the concept of a \u201creminiscence bump,\u201d a person\u2019s tendency to gravitate toward music released during their youth.<\/p>\n \n\tTo 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.<\/p>\n \n\tFor this reporter (hi, me, Tom\u00e1s Mier), Wrapped landed on a listening age of 30 \u2014 not far off from my actual age of 27 \u2014 because I was \u201cinto music from the early 2010s.\u201d For someone who listened to a lot of music from the Seventies, though, Spotify hypothesized that their formative years would\u2019ve been around that time, landing them around a listening age of 63.<\/p>\n \n\tWe polled the Rolling Stone<\/em> staff on their listening ages \u2014 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 \u201clistening like\u201d forty-somethings or septuagenarians. The average listening age of our newsroom? A very respectable 55 years old.<\/p>\n