Happy Spotify Day! It’s that time of year again where half your social media feed is filled with visuals from Spotify’s annual, personalized collection and the other half are people whining about how they don’t care about your Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped shows listeners the most played songs and artists, along with other fun surprises. This year, the roundup added a new feature called “Sound Town,” which matches users in a city where residents share their musical taste. For fans of some folk indie rock artists, Burlington, Vermont has been oddly popular, especially since the town only has a population of approx. 44,000. Surprisingly popular enough that people on Reddit and X are talking about why we’ve assigned all of us the Vermonter from Spotify…. weirdly popular enough that several people joked that the Burlington tourism board paid Spotify and, yes, weirdly popular enough that I made a spreadsheet and collected data about the listening habits of people who share Burlington’s music preferences.
Of 20 nominated Burlingtonians who shared their listening data with me, some bands like boygenius and Big Thief were disproportionately popular — that includes the work of the solo artists who make up those two bands: Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Adrienne Lenker , all of them are queer and have a particularly large following among queer women.
Grammy-nominated artists Big Thief and boygenius may not be household names (yet), but they’re popular enough to influence Spotify’s data. Big Thief has 2.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify. boygenius has 4.4 million. This influence is likely amplified in Spotify’s dataset, as someone who listens to boygenius probably also listens to Phoebe Bridgers (10.5 million monthly listeners), who also listens to Lucy Dacus (1.7 million), and so on.
The cultural relevance of boygenius among young queer people cannot be overstated, and apparently, it’s enough to form a trend in the Spotify Wrapped data. In a profile for them called “The Infinite Gay Joy of Boygenius,” Lex McMenamin defines the attraction that bands like boygenius have for queer fans:[boygenius’ recent album] asks important questions about faith and death and trust and relationships, but for once, they come from minds that believe that women and trans and queer people and people of color are people, that people deserve a basic income, a job and home, we should be allowed to live. Rock music as a whole can’t even achieve that standard in 2023.”
According to Spotify Wrapped, people in Burlington are also more likely to be fans of Ethel Cain, HAIM, Palehound, Samia, Radiator Hospital, Indigo De Souza, Rilo Kiley, Car Seat Headrest and other acts in similar genres, several of the which is queer.
According to Burlington mayor on the city’s official website, Burlington residents tend to be “diverse and forward-thinking” and “immersed in the arts and culture.” A friend who lives in Burlington (and who also took Burlington to their Wrapped) put it more bluntly: “We have a lot of sad gay students with a wide variety of musical tastes,” they told me on Discord. When I posted on X that I was looking into what’s up with Burlington and boygenius, another person he responded: “That’s because Burlington is the lesbian capital of the USA. hope it helps <3"
People with neighboring musical tastes also found themselves stuck in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California. In a post with 33,000 likes, @brokebackstan He wrote“spotify is trying to build a gay community in Berkeley, a lesbian community in Burlington, and a bisexual community in Cambridge.” Other user, @worms5brain wrote, “Why every gay has Burlington USA as their rolled up location.” Author Abby Modale He wrote“does it… you know… share spotify listening habits with Berkeley, Burlington or Cambridge?”
Spotify said in a statement to TechCrunch, “Sound Town was created to show users how their listening habits are shared by communities everywhere. The Sound Town selected for each eligible user has the most similar taste profile to their own – based on the most streamed artists of the year and how those artists are broadcast to other cities around the world. It is objective and driven entirely by a user’s listening history.”
Just 0.6% of fans will pick Burlington as Sound Town, out of 1,300 possible locations. However, this is about 7.8 times higher than the average that would be if there was an even distribution of users across each of the 1,300 locations (0.07%).
Even Spotify’s X account acknowledged the anomaly:
What makes the situation in Burlington more peculiar, however, is that some of the people who were entrusted with the city had completely different musical tastes, favoring “dad rock” bands like Steely Dan and the Grateful Dead. Fair enough — Burlington is no monolith. But the facts are skewed even more by the ultimate wildcard, a woman whose powers are big enough to completely mess up anyone’s Spotify Wrapped: Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift is the with the greatest flow artist across Spotify, with 107.7 million monthly listeners. That’s about 2,447 Burlingtons. Of course, it shows up in that subset of Spotify listeners who reside in Burlington, because it’s everywhere and inescapable in a way that’s both exciting and terrifying. From the 20-person data I have, Taylor Swift appears in listeners’ Top 5 artists eight times. Again, this is likely true of other Sound Towns, since no one is immune to Taylor. Not even the NFL.
Another factor is rising folk star Noah Kahan, with 24.9 million monthly listeners, who is from Strafford, Vermont, population 1,094. Strafford is about an hour and a half’s drive from Burlington, but hometown pride for the singer-songwriter radiates throughout the Green Mountain State. Kahan’s 2023 album ‘Stick Season’ catapulted him to the top Advertising sign charts, but his collaborations with artists like Hozier (also a Burlington favorite) and Post Malone helped expose him to a wider audience. So Kahan’s followers have found themselves assigned to Burlington as well.
So far, these artists have not acknowledged their potential new relationship with Burlington, Vermont. But maybe on their next tour, boygenius will make a stop in Burlington, if there’s even a venue big enough to handle them.
