What Is Up With Spotify’s Awful Slang Usage?

I spent a good chunk of my 2021 eagerly awaiting the month December, not because of the holidays, or the holiday sales, or the new year. No. I anticipate December because that’s when I get something even better than time with my loved ones, or meaningful gifts, or even half-price Christmas candy from Walgreens. December is when I get my Spotify Wrapped.

In recent years Spotify Wrapped has become an entity unto itself. Somehow the music streaming service has made an entire social media event revolving around it. When you open the Spotify app, the platform delivers each listener a little slideshow going over their listening habits, including their most listened to artists and songs, how many cumulative minutes they spent in the app, etc. As an avid music fan and listener whose tastes and preferences change frequently, it’s a fun way to look back at my music listening journey during the last 12-odd months. In 2021, Spotify Wrapped dropped on December first. The first thing I did when I woke up that morning was go into Spotify and pour over my Wrapped.

It was all fun and games until I came across the first red flag, a slide that read “ready to get into the thick of it?” This sentence piqued my interest because while it made sense on its own, I recognized it as a possible reference to a TikTok trend from months before. In one of the app’s wackier musical moments, the track “Into The Thick Of It!” from the popular children’s cartoon The Backyardigans was used to soundtrack thousands of videos. At the time, I thought I was looking too deep into the usage of a commonly used phrase. Looking back, I now recognize that it was an omen of what was to come.

As I continued on, I was met with a barrage of mind-boggling quotes. “You deserve a playlist as long as your skincare routine.” “In a year like 2021, even your music gets a vibe check.” “You always understood the assignment. You listened to 131 different genres this year.” “There was one podcast that lived in your head, rent-free, all year long.”

Now Spotify wasn’t playing in a gray area. They were outwardly using the language of different memes and social media trends. Even worse, they were using it incorrectly. Incorrectly in a way that made the Wrapped as a whole impossible to enjoy. I felt like Spotify was reaching through my screen, desperately attempting to relate to me and be “hip with the youths.” It was a perfect encapsulation of that meme consisting of a screenshot from 30 Rock where Steve Buscemi traipses down a high school hallway in a backwards baseball cap and says “how do you do, fellow kids?” despite clearly having half a century behind him. It was a bona-fide lingo salad that came across disingenuous at best and downright pandering at worst.

Going through the slideshow, I wasn’t thinking about the collection of my most-listened to songs that Spotify had just presented me with. I was thinking about how my skincare routine isn’t really that long, it’s just face-wash and moisturizer. I wasn’t paying attention to the data about the podcasts I frequented throughout the year. I was thinking about how those podcasts had never lived in my head rent-free. In fact, I don’t think a podcast has ever lived in anyone’s head rent-free. Maybe a moment from a podcast, but not the podcast in and of itself.

After this revelation, I started to notice Spotify’s misuasage of slang all over the platform, especially in their playlist captions. The playlist big on the internet sports the caption “iykyk.” internet crush features “me gustas mucho. <3 I’ve got a crush on you.” Night Pop has “dancing under the streetlights type beat.” my life is a movie contains “every main character needs their soundtrack” and the playlist fit check has “welcome to your unboxing playlist.” Then there’s the one that, you could say, has been living in my head rent-free for a while now. The playlist Low-Key, which has the caption “it’s just chill vibes, respectfully.”

Let’s take a deeper look at this caption: “it’s just chill vibes, respectfully.” If Spotify Wrapped struck the match for me to write this essay, then “it’s just chill vibes, respectfully” poured a gallon of gasoline onto the flames. I was so haunted by the phrase “it’s just chill vibes, respectfully” that I willed pen to paper, that’s how much it bugged me. But I can understand if you don’t get why that is. The phrases “it’s just chill vibes” and “respectfully” work in isolation, so they must work when put together like that, right? Well, it’s not that simple.

So, from an analytical angle, why doesn’t this work? When I read this phrase as a whole, there’s a dissonance, because the word “respectfully” isn’t being used in the correct manner. The lingo I believe Spotify has attempted to employ here is a form of the “I am looking respectfully” meme. In an online landscape saturated with thirst traps, the phrase “I am looking respectfully” is often used by a commentator on a salacious post, reincorporating some dignity back into the exchange. The phrase is funny because it is usually used ironically, to point out the contradictory nature of this interaction. You’re “looking respectfully,” but still looking, and admitting this reveals the look may not be as chaste as the phrase “respectfully” implies. Linguistically the isolated “respectfully” is used in place of a phrase such as “no offense.” So tell me, does the phrase “it’s just chill vibes, no offense” make sense? No it doesn’t. It does not have chill vibes, respectfully. In fact, it has unchill vibes. It has positively rancid vibes, and I mean that with full disrespect.

There’s this thing about social media slang that I don’t think a lot of older people, or brands, seem to get. Every social media platform has language rules that work in a way that is unique itself. Everyone who is familiar with this language subconsciously absorbs these rules, the conventions, rhythm, and intricacies, over time. Like with any language, if you’re super familiar with it, you can tell when it isn’t quite being used in the right way. When you look at the way Spotify employs internet slang, it’s clear that they aren’t fluent.

A lot of what makes communication on the internet fun is that there’s a nonchalance and spontaneity to it. These captions wouldn’t bother me if I found them scrolling through playlists made by my friends, or everyday people compiling their favorite tracks, but here they just leave a bad taste in my mouth. I can tell that the “randomness XD” is carefully measured, calculated to hit on popular phrases to spark recognition in a certain age demographic without understanding how to actually use them. Spotify playlists aren’t nonchalant or spontaneous. They’re carefully curated to keep you listening for as long as possible. Labels can get their artists pushed to the top of the list. When Spotify captions a playlist with “it’s just chill vibes, respectfully” I don’t feel seen as a member of Gen Z. I can tell that this language is just as calculated as the product it represents. I can tell I’m being manipulated.

The language of social media is constantly evolving, shifting. There’s a fluidity to it. It’s a primordial soup of references, references to those references, niche social media micro communities, African American Vernacular English, decades-long internet in-jokes, words and ideas alike pulled from a vast array of languages and cultures all over the globe, and countless other things. It’s a communal effort. When I come across an obviously focused grouped piece of advertiser content from a huge company co-opting “Gen Z slang,” the corporate and the communal clash so hard I plunge headfirst into the uncanny valley.

This phenomenon isn’t specific to Spotify either. In recent years, I’ve found that social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming less and less fun to use because they’re getting overrun by advertiser content. It’s not just the fact that it’s advertiser content though. These platforms make money through advertising, it’s going to be there no matter what. The issue is that these advertisements are trying to blend in with the rest of the content on these platforms, especially in their usage of language. For example, on TikTok you’ll come across posts like “do the State Farm dance challenge” or “tell me you eat at Applebees without telling me you eat at Applebees.”

Unlike other brands, Spotify doesn’t have to adapt to blend in on another platform. They are the platform. So why are they taking on these same manipulative tactics? Spotify is trying to act like they’re one of us, just another member of Gen Z, hip with the kids, but they’re not. The poor intern generating these captions may be, but Spotify is Spotify. They’re not my friend. They’re not even a person. They’re a multimillion dollar corporation. Seeing these instances of misused slang completely jarred me out of the experience of going through my Spotify Wrapped because I had to come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t just a fun glance back to my listening habits in 2021, but a way for Spotify to show off just how well they mined my personal information and data by wrapping it up in a calculatedly relatable package.

I don’t know what to say in the face of this. I don’t necessarily need Spotify to get “better” at using this slang. With the way the language of the internet evolves at such a breakneck speed, I don’t know if that’s even possible. In the time it takes to put a marketing campaign together, get feedback on it, revise it, focus group it, and send it out to the world, the hip lingo will already be leagues behind what’s cool. Maybe these two worlds just aren’t meant to mix.

At the very least there is one direct fix I can offer. Spotify Wrapped in past years hasn’t used this butchered slang-speak. Spotify has a bunch of playlists that don’t have the issue of grossly misused slang, it seems to be just the ones catered towards a Gen Z market. So from one Gen Z-er to a giant company that will likely never read this: you don’t have to condescend to us by pretending to be our friend. Just be Spotify, whatever that means, the good, the bad, and the corporate.

Respectfully.