Your "Listener Age" Is Your D&D Level
Spotify says your listener age is 68.
That’s not a roast. That’s your level—your Dungeons & Dragons level.
Every December, social media fills with Wrapped screenshots, and inevitably someone posts their listener age with a joking wince: It says I’m 72. I listened to too much Dusty Springfield. The joke is familiar and self-effacing: you’ve been called old, out of step with whatever the algorithm thinks of as “now.”
But there’s another way to read that number.
What if listener age weren’t a measure of how dated you are, but of how far you’ve traveled?
In role-playing games, a high level isn’t something to hide. It’s earned. A Level 68 character has roamed through strange territories, gathered hard-won knowledge, survived encounters that would flatten a novice. They carry scars and stories. They know the hidden routes and the names of things that no longer appear on maps.
A high listener age suggests something similar. It means you’ve wandered deep into the musical wilds—through format wars and forgotten genres, through the ambient-drone winter of 2005 and the vinyl revival that followed. You’ve brought home strange bootlegs like protective charms. You’ve learned the quiet paths where the old sounds still breathe. You’ve cracked open box sets and followed liner-note footpaths into neighboring decades. You’ve unlocked a corner of the cosmology.
The inversion works because it keeps the truth and changes the light. Spotify’s algorithm is noticing something real: your habits lean toward older recordings, deeper catalogs, untended corners of the archive. The question is whether that’s a liability or a legacy. In RPG terms, it’s the latter. Obscurity becomes lore proficiency. Eccentric taste becomes specialization. “Out of touch” becomes “in touch with things most listeners haven’t reached yet.”
And what about the outlier—the 20-year-old who fell into 1960s Chicago blues and surfaced with a listener age of 71? That isn’t “lol, gramps.” That’s the young sage who found the hidden stairway early, who opened the sealed tomes and listened long enough for Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to speak back. While peers still gather XP in the bright starter zones of contemporary playlists, this one has already descended into the glowing depths. They haven’t aged prematurely. They’ve leveled astonishingly fast—a prodigy who rolled a natural 20 on Curiosity and slipped straight into wizardhood.
Listener age, then, isn’t biological age. It’s the distance you’ve traveled in the long song. Some spend sixty years reaching Level 60. Some find the hidden door at twenty and arrive, blinking, among the ancients.
Either way: respect the journey.