Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I'm baffled and embarrassed by my Spotify Wrapped

You tell me what "Goblincore" is because not only do I have no clue, I'm pretty damn sure that it's something of which no soul and disco-loving woman in her 60s should be proud.

Yes, I'm in the same agony of embarrassment and attempted recovery as most of my social media-addicted generation, as my Spotify Wrapped for the year has dropped — and I don't know who the hell they are talking about.

My top artist for the year is… Taylor Swift? OK, so I loved the concert, and I had a few mellow, autumnal days with The Tortured Poets Department, but how did she rise above all the Indie Australian and neo-disco and alt-British and fave 90s that I actually listened to all year? Like that other recently scored year-long project, the HSC, are songs given varying weightings in the Spotify ranks?

And then I went and apparently had this Goblincore Movie Tunes Soundtrack Moment in September (what an ugly sentence), because of a preference for the internet musical, Over the Garden Wall, and John Williams compositions — when none of it is my fault at all.

Yes, the pitfalls of refusing to buy a separate Spotify account for a 12-year-old…

Just once, I wish my Wrapped actually wrapped up me.

I've become another mum meme

Last year my top artist was the guy who scores music for Japanese anime and the Korean conductor of reimagined Star Wars themes. So perhaps I should be grateful for a small mercy of minor improvement. The young ones at my gym guffawed at my data, but not as much as they did at the trainer who talked about her Apple Music Replay… "Ewwww".

So I've become another mum meme of the all the women who know that peace only reigns in the car when the kids have control over the music, now that the toddler days of brainwashing them with the Clash, the Cult and Meatloaf are well behind us.

But who cares? The algorithm does, of course, because the dopamine kick of perhaps achieving a super-cool Wrapped one sunny December will, I'm sure, keep me swiping well into 2025. I'm already frantically liking a whole lot of music from Telenova, St Vincent and a few Florence Welch DJ remixes to restore my sense of self — and cheat the program.

I shouldn't care at all, in fact I should probably delete the app and go back to straight purchases, because as the Australian singer-songwriter and one-time half of Savage Garden Darren Hayes argued, when he posted the cold facts from United Musicians and Allied Workers, Spotify hasn't done anything for him lately.

The American UMAW has been needling Spotify with irrefutably uncomfortable data of their own, showing that Spotify pays a maximum of 0.003 cents per stream and has fired most of their curatorial staff, instead relying on AI for the $2.5 billion salary the union says Spotify founder, Daniel Ek, makes.

The union is running a Make Streaming Pay campaign, along with arguing for a Living Wage for Musicians Act that mirrors the fight writers in Hollywood went through to get a reasonable return from the streaming system that profits from their creativity.

The solution is opaque

The laziness of the addiction is the problem: now that I can just set and forget the annual fee and get access to almost anything I want to hear any time, I don't want to be discomfited by the suggestion that my money isn't really going to the artists I love. I signed up because I never wanted to rip their music illegally, I wanted to pay the price — so who tricked me?

As Freakonomics put it, Ek "saved" the record labels by making them an offer they couldn't refuse: a legal platform to stream their music and stop the pirating but, in a mogul move that we all should have seen coming, it of course was never going to benefit the musicians downstream. And now we are trapped, because nobody buys their music on CDs and carries a Discman anymore. Which is a pity.

The solution is opaque: you'd have to be the aforementioned artist, Taylor Swift, to actually make a dint in Spotify by removing your music, and in any case she could only do that with the versions that were hers.

The simplest solution? Make Spotify pay a fairer streaming share: in other words, insist that the banks make less profit. Yeah right. I'd have a better chance of landing a Hot-Girl Wrapped in 2025.

This weekend we have tales of the green fairy and O the places you can go if living in Trump-land is not going to be for you. In other words, it's a weekend of escape.

Have a safe and happy weekend — and if you're in need of a simple, moreish and affordable family meal as you gird your loins for the onslaught that is the pre-Christmas/Christmas over-eating season, I have a tin of tuna you may be interested in.

I was a guest recently on Alice Zazlavsky's ABC TV show, A Bite to Eat, and together we resurrected the tuna mornay, with a beautiful herb crust and much more flavour than you remember from your suburban childhood. Seriously — it's delicious. You can watch my debut as a TV cook here (all notes accepted) and make the dish here.

I'd play this while you were cooking it: it suits the era and the mood. Go well. 

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.