Winners and Losers: Spotify shares Wrapped stats as Google purges inactive accounts

After taking a week’s break from this column to focus on Black Friday, we’re back with another edition of Winners and Losers. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that much of our attention over the past week was won over by all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. However, there were still a handful of major updates that took place this week that grabbed our attention. 

Keep reading to discover who we named our winner and loser this week. 

Winner: Spotify 

Our winner this week is Spotify after the music streaming app released its Wrapped results for 2023. 

Spotify Wrapped is Spotify’s annual breakdown of each user’s personal listening history, including your top five most-played artists, songs and albums. 

Additional insights added this year include a ‘Me in 2023’ listening character that matches your listening habits, a Sound Town or city where others listen similarly to you and commentary from your own AI DJ. 

Wrapped typically drops at the beginning of December, giving each of us a prime opportunity to reminisce on our own year in music as 2023 comes to a close. It’s also common to compare your Wrapped results with friends by posting your stats across social media for followers to see and share their own. 

In this way, Wrapped is arguably the biggest marketing opportunity of the year for Spotify and a major feature that keeps subscribers loyal despite competitors like Apple Music and Deezer offering their own end-of-year recaps to rival Spotify’s. 

Loser: Google 

This week’s loser is more of an inconvenience than anything else, as Google officially began purging accounts that the company considered inactive. 

Google’s definition of inactive is any account that has been left signed out for two years. This means that if you have any Google accounts that are attached to old email addresses, social media accounts, Google Drives, Google Photos or YouTube that you don’t want to lose, you’ll need to act fast to keep hold of them (if Google hasn’t gotten to them first). 

Google first warned of this plan back in May, stating that all content from accounts left inactive for two years will be deleted along with the accounts themselves. 

Thankfully, the company is starting with accounts that were created and never used again, so if you’ve been using a dormant Google account to store photos from an old phone or your Google account is attached to an ancient YouTube channel you may still have a chance to save your content. 

If you’re concerned you could be at risk of losing an old Google account, our best advice is to sign in ASAP. It’s also a good idea to show Google you’re active by sending an email, watching a YouTube video, downloading an app or conducting a simple Google search.