Music

Spotify’s Summer Rewind is vital to unleashing your best summer self

Re-experience your Playlist of Summers Past with Spotify’s new Summer Rewind feature. Sure we’re all constantly growing and improving and nuancing our music aesthetic (right? progress?), but fave summer tracks are often like a fine wine, only getting more delicious and nostalgic with age. Summer Rewind is Spotify’s aged cheese plate, it’s offering of seasonally curated jams, it’s history of you and your warm weather adventures with its music algorithm.

The playlist can currently be found at the top of your Spotify account homepage. While the extensive knowledge of the algorithm that built the playlist does make you fear slightly for the privacy of your preferences, and how many Chinese billboards your top picks are currently plastered on, it’s fun and useful enough that you can drown those fears by bumping your favorite guilty pleasure track from 2014 just a little louder.

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Notably, and perhaps obviously, the playlist will be richer and more extensive for longer time, more involved Spotify users. The release of this newest of Spotify-curated albums coincides with T Swift’s decision to rejoin the world of streaming services, including Spotify.

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According to Spotify’s official announcement, only users who joined before June 2016 and who are in one of 20 Northern Hemisphere countries get a Summer Rewind playlist. Spotify also released a 50 Years of Songs of the Summer playlist, which is ripe for a study on how long it takes for guilty pleasure songs to shift to nostalgic throwback tracks. (For example, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” – considered by Spotify to be the definitive musical achievement of 2011 – remains almost objectively a guilty pleasure, but Rihanna’s “Umbrella” – the crown jewel of 2007, apparently – would seem to be shifting to the nostalgic throwback realm.)

Summer reveals our truest selves, so this is essentially a tarot card reading for your ears, and thus your soul.

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