Another Recap — Unwrapped

Why the most-streamed aren't the most-loved

Dec 09, 2025

I thought this week’s Another Recap was going to be a short one as we’re busy wrapping up the year ourselves and sending out little tokens of gratitude to the people that opened doors we didn’t know existed, and made 2025 anything but predictable through collaborations and conversations that found another way out of the sameness. (sneak peek at the bottom)
But then I fell into this spotify wrabbit hole…

Next week we’ll come with our own fav music list of ’25. Like every year we curate our favourites. Not based on play count or what the techbro’s are dictating but on what we think is interesting; what grabbed our attention, what felt good at that moment when we listened to it for the first time, or for the 99th, or just what we think you should listen to as well. As you know by now we’re not a big fan of the algo and this week our attention moved (thanks to that same algorithm? 🤷🏻) towards a few really good articles and Substacks.

Here’s what was good last weeks

In a way it’s all connected around the idea that the most liked/streamed/shared/… aren’t necessarily the most loved. Maybe even the opposite. Somehow it was all catapulted by the spotify wrapped 🤢 (somehow this emoji really connects to the spotify logo?) (Or as Adrian Joffe quoted Rei Kawakubo: “we’re a little bit tired of big business, big culture, and global systems. What about the small things that happen over all continents, everywhere – aren’t they global, that’s not big?”) (thank you julien rademaker for sharing).

Liz Pelly (author of Mood Machine) puts it in this Guardian article, that “…rather than letting a streaming service tell you what records were important to you simply because you played them the most on one app, consider taking the time to write a list based on what you actually connected with. Share it if you feel like it – even if it’s just a notes app screenshot or a scribbled, handwritten list that you photograph and share with a caption. Even if you only text or email it to some friends. Or if you prefer, write it in a notebook just for yourself and your archives.” As said, we’ll share next week…

But there’s so much in this article that resonates. Since it’s not only the algorithm. That’s the late ‘10s vibe. It’s mostly AI which moves us in 2025. “It is an especially urgent consideration in 2025, a landmark year for consumers being sold on this sort of cognitive offloading via consumer-facing AI. It can feel as though every day there is some new start-up prompt-based surveillance product claiming to ease the daily burdens of reading, writing, researching, summarising or brainstorming – but this is the work that helps shape how we think, how we make connections, what we remember and what we forget.”

And then there was this long read interview with Dijon Duenas who spent months in creative paralysis before making Baby, an album he deliberately engineered to resist passive listening. After abandoning one complete record and spiralling through what he calls “psychosis-level shit,” he finally embraced his scraps (unfinished demos, discarded takes, abandoned ideas) and ran the entire thing through a $10 DJ app that compressed it beyond conventional mastering. His goal was radical: “I wanted my music to be positively embarrassing to play in public,” with fluctuating volumes that would force constant adjustment, refusing to let it become background wallpaper. He’s openly hostile to streaming as “testing grounds for machine learning” and sees his role as being “a sore thumb within the thing”, making music deliberately difficult to passively consume (LOVE that!). His creative philosophy centers on mistakes as methodology: “My thing is mistakes” he says, treating everything (failed sessions, freestyles, archived stems) as equal data to be mangled and reassembled. The friction isn’t a bug, it’s the entire architecture. Where Spotify Wrapped wants to smooth your year into digestible metrics, Dijon wants to make you sit with discomfort, forcing the kind of active attention that keeps both artist and listener sharp. And then we haven’t even talked about this album that isn’t even on any streaming service.
Love how Dijon puts it: “When streaming services often seem like a ‘testing grounds for machine learning,’ why not try to fuck things up a bit?... if I can be a sore thumb within the thing, just by making the music a little bit more difficult to just sit there.... Why not do that?”

On 8Ball, Monahan touched the same vibe, noting that streaming platforms aren’t cultural institutions, they’re data extraction operations. They don’t curate, they optimize for engagement. Short for “more noise, less signal.”

And of course it all connects with what we do, what we’re good at, and what at moments feels so grinch to do: creating content (is content really the new pornography?)

In all this, frictionless became the death of genuine engagement. And I guess what we’re trying to say and to do, is bringing some friction back to the game. Because when consumption metrics replace critical judgment, virality becomes the only signal. Healey is adding that we’re complicit; we’re performing our consumption for each other’s gaze, creating a closed loop of mutual fantasy. I’ve met enough people now who genuinely thought that I was on holiday for 365 days, based on my instagram posts… which was exactly my point? Let’s put some sand back in the machine…

Because memory, judgment, thinking, and now even basic competence systematically automating away every faculty that makes us sharp, curious, critical beings.
So… We’ve outsourced memory (Pelly), judgment (Monahan), and now even desire itself (Healey) to algorithmic systems that can only measure voyeuristic performance and measure ‘success’ by that.

Let’s find another way in, or out in 2026. (If you think you can show us a way, drop us a line and we’ll send you a little token of gratitude)