Do Private Sessions Affect Spotify Wrapped? Answered!

Spotify has two unique features in Spotify: Wrapped and Private Listening. Do these two features affect one another?

We’ll review what private sessions do, in addition to the idea of Spotify Wrapped and discuss how the two relate.

What is Spotify Wrapped?

Spotify Wrapped is a feature unique to Spotify. At the end of the year, Spotify sends you what looks like a social media story with info about the music you discovered this year in addition to what you played the most of.

The app even creates a 100 song playlist with your most frequently played music from the last year, which is quite convenient for those who don’t want to spend time making their own playlist of recent songs.

Wrapped provides an excellent opportunity to revisit some of the music that you listened to earlier in the year – and perhaps forgot about.

We also listen to some artists and genres for a little while, only to move on – well, Wrapped reminds you of what you did like invites you to listen to some of the same music, which could also lead to finding new artists or songs in the process.

For fun, Spotify also gives you a Spotify “personality” which is a bit akin to the results of a workplace or school personality test in which you receive a four letter acronym that refers to elements of your music thoughts.

What is a private session?

A private session limits the amount of data Spotify collects about your listening. 

To make a long story short, Spotify makes some of your music and podcast choices available to your friends on Spotify. The same data is also used to contribute to the creation of new playlists and recommendations.

Let’s say you won’t want your friends knowing what you’ve been listening to, and you don’t want certain podcasts or songs influencing your recommendations or playlists – then turn on a private session and listen. 

Note that private sessions are not permannt: They end when you restart the app or after you’ve been offline for six hours or more.

It’s clear that Spotify likes to use your data to enhance the listening experience, though!

Think of private sessions as browning “incognito”. Many people who are shopping for gifts, a surprise – or just finding banner ads annoying can shop in incognito to avoid seeing the products again later – or risk someone else seeing them. 

You could even use a private session to listen to music or podcasts you don’t want to discuss with others, since it is possible for others to see what you’ve played.

So are private sessions in Wrapped?

Wrapped actually offers very few details about your private sessions, which is probably a good thing for privacy.

While the amount of time you spend listening to music includes your private sessions, anything listened to while in a private session does not show up on your Wrapped.

Note that if you did listen to something outside of private and inside – then the music or podcasts will be present in your Wrapped – partially by chance.

Since Wrapped does produce a playlist based on the music you listened to during the year, no, the music you listened to in private sessions will not be on the playlist unless you happened to listen to it in public mode too.

Overall, private sessions do a pretty good job of actually keeping your listening private. The only issue we see is that you’ll need to manually re-enter private sessions after you stop listening for a while, and this can be annoying for frequent users. 

At the same time, non-private sessions are what powers Spotify’s pretty accurate algorithms that help you find new music, so of course they want you to use them fully.

Can I turn off Wrapped?

Not yet. While some users have requested the ability to turn off their Wrapped, the Spotify app hasn’t made a tool yet to allow doing so. 

Another easy suggestion here is that the purpose of Wrapped is to both help you revisit previous music, and to create a viral marketing campaign. While Wrapped is available, you don’t need to share it if it contains music you don’t want others to see you listening to.

Spotify may make it possible to opt out of Wrapped, but not yet.

Key Takeaways

• Your Spotify wrapped does not contain information about any music or podcasts listened to during a private sessions
• A private session is intended to prevent Spotify from sharing info about your music and podcasts with friends, as well as helping to power your recommendations and playlists
• The amount of time you spend listening to music and podcasts on private sessions will be included in your total listening time, though you won’t see a breakdown of the time.
• Wrapped is a simple way to remind you of the music you discovered or listened to a lot over the course of a year.