By Arlina Yang, AsAmNews Intern
Spotify is bringing a spotlight to the small town of Davis in California. Not for the cows nor the campus of University of California, Davis, but the quantity of K-pop fans in Davis.
With more than 574 million users, including 226 million subscribers to Spotify’s paid services, Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.
Each year-end, the company releases Spotify Wrapped, a recap of your listening habits using data collected from the songs you stream.
Arriving on Nov. 29th, Spotify Wrapped took music lovers across the world by storm as fans began sharing their statistics across social media. Spotify keeps tabs on users’ listening data in an effort to better curate one’s preferences of their top artists and songs.
“Because UC Davis has a relatively large Asian college student body, a lot of K-pop fans are condensed in this small college town,” Connie Zhu, Class of 2027, told AsAmNews. “Since college students make up such a sizable ratio in the Davis resident population, it’s not really a surprise that Davis popped up on a lot of people’s Spotify Wrapped.”
According to a Spokesperson who told TIME, over 156 million users engaged with Wrapped in 2022. And this year, Spotify added a new feature to Wrapped named “My Sound Town”. This new data point shows users different locations of the world where there are the most people listening to the same type of music listed in one’s Spotify Wrapped.
“Through swiping up on Instagram stories or talking about it during a hangout, I think that Spotify Wrapped is great way for people to bond and connect with others with similar music taste.” said Lucie Vu, Class of 2027.
In addition to Davis, other college towns like Berkeley, Burlington, and Cambridge were also frequent results on many users’ Sound Town results on Spotify Wrapped.
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