As we all know, Spotify Wrapped came out yesterday. I didn’t expect my ult group to be in my top 5 artists, and I didn’t expect them to have a song in my top 5 songs. I just haven’t listened to them much: neither of their releases from this year stuck out to me, and I’m not listening to their older stuff much either. So I knew that there was no way my ult group would make either of the top 5 lists.
What I didn’t expect is that my ults don’t even have a song in my top 100. I checked last.fm, and my #100 song had 17 plays this year. My most-streamed song by my ult group had 13 plays.
This ties in with something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. What does it even mean for a group to be your “ult”? I think that the ideal version is this: they’re your most-listened-to artist, you keep up with all of their socials, you watch their variety, you’re engaged in their fandom, and you like all of them as people. You go to their concerts/fanmeets if you can, and in general you spend more money on them than any other artist.
But of course, I don’t think that most people do all of those things for their ults. As someone in college with a job, it’s impossible for me to truly keep up with everything. So, this raises the question: how little can you interact with your ults before they stop being your ults? If I don’t keep up with their variety, didn’t spend any money on them this year (compared to hundreds on other artists), hardly listened to their music, and didn’t engage in their fandom, does it even make sense for me to call them my ult group?
I think that the easy answer is “your ult group is whoever you want it to be.” But I feel like that’s just not useful. Like, if you tell someone that a group is your ult, it implies that you listen to a lot of their music and keep up with their variety and so forth. If you don’t do any of that, then it seems like calling them your “ult” just isn’t a useful way to communicate about them. Like, I’m seriously getting tired of saying “this is my ult, except I don’t really listen to their music, and this other artist is my most-listened-to artist.”
Anyway, I asked a few questions in this post, so feel free to answer whatever you want. I’m really curious to know what you think, because I’m kind of having a crisis of confidence right now.
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