This Wednesday morning, many Macalester students woke up and checked Instagram to see that their friends had already posted their Spotify Wrapped — a yearly compilation of Spotify’s users’ listening habits. It takes their listening analytics and turns them into an interactive experience — which people usually skip to see their most listened to songs and artists of the year. The Mac Weekly sent out an anonymous Google Form to the Macalester student body asking them about their listening habits in 2025. We received 86 responses of people’s Spotify Wrapped (plus Apple Music Replay and even YouTube Music Recap) results, representing a little over 3.5 percent of the student body, and found some interesting trends in the data.
The average Scot listened to 39,382 minutes of music and other audio in 2025.
• There is one outlier in the data, with the top listener at Mac listening to 274,554 minutes of content. This would be equivalent to listening to Spotify for over half of the year!
• Excluding this outlier, the runner-up at Mac listened to 128,005 minutes of content on Spotify.
• The user with the lowest listening time had just 7,646 minutes.
To no one’s surprise, Taylor Swift, for the third year in a row, was Macalester’s most-listened-to artist, with Indie Pop being this year’s most popular genre.
• The showgirl herself turned the skies opalite over Grand Avenue, with seven Scots having Taylor Swift as their most-listened-to artist in 2025.
• Other Mac students had top artists in common with Bladee, The Magnetic Fields, Alex G, Hozier, Frank Ocean, The Marias and TWS, each dominating two Mac students’ wrapped. Tate McRae had three mentions.
• Macalester’s own Joe College was a top artist of one student.
• Other top genres included Alternative Rock and Pop Rap, dominating six Mac students’ listening habits. Five Mac students reported Alternative and Pop as their most listened to genres.
Mac Students had a wide variety of top albums and songs, with no consensus.
• Three Mac Students put “69 Love Songs” by The Magnetic Fields as their most listened to album. The Mac Weekly’s Web Editor Alex Brinkman ’27* would like to encourage people who had this as their most listened to album to contact him.
• Additionally, “So Close to What” by Tate McRae and “Hozier (Extended Version)” by Hozier were other top albums of Macalester, shared by two Mac students each.
• “Sports Car” by Tate McRae was the only top song shared by two people at Mac.
• Some highlights by Mac students include “In Da Party” by Smokedope2016, “OkCupid/iraq” by Marjorie W.C. Sinclair, “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here” by Alice in Chains, “Diska Disken” by Faråker and “Loud Bar” by Mannequin Pussy.
The student body has some dedicated music fans including listening to their favorites on repeat.
• The Mac Weekly’s Opinion Editor Audrey Milk ’26* came forward and claimed the top spot at Mac for most listens of their top song with 5,269 streams of “Look At You Now” by MALINDA. Milk’s data brings the average streams of students’ top songs to 144.42 plays. On the other end, the person who streamed their top song the least listened to it 12 times.
• Some Mac students made their favorite artists proud by being in the very top listeners worldwide. This included a respondent who was in the top 20 of Destroy Boys and another respondent who was the 57th top listener of Justice Der.
This year, Spotify introduced your listening age based on your music, and we learned that Mac students’ average listening age has them as middle-aged adults.
• Spotify deemed one student as having a seven-year-old listening age, the youngest at Mac. On the other extreme, the oldest listener at Mac had an age of 88 years old. • The average listening age given to Mac students was 52, which reflects the small liberal arts college stereotype of being too wise for your years.
• Only five respondents were deemed college-aged between 18 to 23 years old.
Mac students also have unique taste in audiobooks and podcasts
• Two respondents said that their top podcast was “Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain”. Some other interesting top podcasts included True Crime podcasts “Mórbid” and “Crime Junkie”. Other highlights included “For Your Amusement: A Theme Park Podcast”, “What’s Left of Philosophy” and horror podcast “The Magnus Archives.” Several of respondents also said that they listened to podcasts to fall asleep to.
• A couple of respondents listened to audiobooks like the gothic horror novel “Carmella.”
*Works for The Mac Weekly
Colette Lawler ’27 and Emily Hueser ’26 contributed to the reporting for this story.
