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Why is everyone's Spotify Wrapped 'sound town' Burlington, Vermont?

Spotify responds.

Elizabeth de Luna

on November 30, 2023

An overheard shot of Burlington in the fall.

Credit: halbergman via Getty Images

If you jumped on X / Twitter yesterday morning you may have been greeted by an onslaught of tweets about Spotify Wrapped and one of America's most unassuming cities: Burlington, Vermont.

It's a college town with a population of just 44,000, but its residents apparently listen to music with national appeal. That's according to anecdotal evidence from "Sound Town," a new feature of Spotify's annual Wrapped project that showed users what city in the world had the same "taste profile."

What is going on?

According to users on X / Twitter, a disproportionate number of Spotify users had logged on to see their Wrapped report yesterday morning and were told that their sound town was Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, and, especially, Burlington, Vermont.

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According to X posts, the good folks in Burlington were fans of Dolly Parton, boygenius, Death Cab for Cutie, The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, and Phish, Wilco, The Strokes, The Shins, Jenny Lewis, Maggie Rogers, Fleet Foxes, The National, and dozens of other indie bands.

What does Spotify say?

And while these X posts made it appear that a preponderance of Spotify users listened to the same music, the coincidence had more to do with X users than Spotify ones.

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Spotify told NBC News that there were more than 1,300 sound town cities, with just 0.6% of listeners matching the sound town taste profiles of Burlington, 0.3% to Berkeley, and 0.1% to Cambridge.

That means that X users have similar musical tastes to other X users. And maybe Burlington is just a place for the Extremely Online.

Here are some of the funniest reactions to the trend.

Suspicions arise...

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2023's hottest new genre is Burlington.

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Choose your fighter: Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge?

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Something very LGBTQ is going on...

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Is everyone hanging out in Burlington without me!?

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Topics Music X/Twitter Spotify

Elizabeth de Luna

Culture Reporter

Elizabeth is a digital culture reporter covering the internet's influence on self-expression, fashion, and fandom. Her work explores how technology shapes our identities, communities, and emotions. Before joining Mashable, Elizabeth spent six years in tech. Her reporting can be found in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, TIME, and Teen Vogue. Follow her on Instagram here.