Many Surprised To Discover That Spotify Wrapped Thinks They Should Live In Burlington, Vermont

It's Spotify Wrapped day on social media, the day when Spotify delivers unto its userbase a neat package summarizing their music-listening practices from the past year.

As with every annual Wrapped, Spotify has included a quirky little feature that has led to widespread discussion on social media already. This year, the discourse is centering around a feature that connects the artists one listened to to a particular city called their "sound town" where people are "most likely" to listen to those artists.

More specifically, many are surprised that Spotify Wrapped has connected a large swath of its user base to Burlington, Vermont.

It seems Spotify has decided that if someone listened to indie rock artists in 2023, then they belong in Burlington, a hip town of 44,000 residents in upstate Vermont. Artists that are pegged to Burlington include The Beths, Fleet Foxes, The Strokes, Jeff Rosenstock and 100 Gecs, among many others.

Burlington is a somewhat surprising option for Spotify to peg as the "indie rock" town as opposed to, say, Bushwick NYC, but even more odd, Burlington seems to be the choice for someone who listened to any guitar-based music. Other, decidedly non-indie bands pegged to Burlington include Paramore, Coheed and Cambria, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan.

This has made "Burlington" the surprising meme of Spotify Wrapped Day 2023, much like Bubblegrunge was in 2021.

Throughout the day so far, numerous social media users are expressing their surprise at learning about Burlington and thinking there must be something special happening there since it is apparently the place tying a huge chunk of the world together.

Cambridge, Berkeley and Santa Cruz have also proven to be common locations for Spotify Wrapped users, but none have been as surprising as Burlington, a town that apparently no one knows and is apparently, at least in Spotify's eyes, simultaneously the town of hipsters and sad gay people.