Spotify Wrapped Genres: What The Heck Is ‘DreamSMP’?
It’s that time of year again, the day that we’ve all been waiting for: Spotify Wrapped. A time to reminisce on (or regret) your past year’s listening habits.
In case you don’t know, Spotify Wrapped is an annual feature that the streaming service uses to call out… we mean give you some insight on your music preferences from January 1st to October 31st of that year. It tells you your most listened to songs and artists, as well as telling you your “Audio Aura”, a new feature for 2021.
Another of the features in Spotify Wrapped is the “genres” section, where it shows your top 5 most listened to genres. Some make complete sense, and you can tell exactly which part of the year the data has been pulled from. Listened to a lot of ABBA? Sure, pop, that tracks. Others… seem to have turned up out of nowhere.
One genre that was a mystery to many users was called “DreamSMP”.
But… what is DreamSMP? And why did it turn up in the Spotify Wrapped of so many people who’d never heard of it before?
DreamSMP is a private, exclusive Minecraft multiplayer server, owned by the Dream Team, a team made up of YouTuber Dream and his 2 friends, Sapnap and GeorgeNotFound. Known for its improvisational role-play and high profile guests, the server gained notoriety on both YouTube and Twitch.
“But that isn’t music!” I hear you say – you’re right. It’s not. So why is it on Spotify?
It all started when Dream, known for his Minecraft speedrun videos, said (in a since-deleted tweet) that the only way to get more followers on YouTube was to start making music. He followed through with this, releasing his debut song, “Roadtrip”. He has since gone on to release 2 other songs, including the highly anticipated “Mask”.
Dream’s dive into a music career is where the genre is suggested to have originated. From this, if you have listened to any guests on the server who also have a music career, such as CorpseHusband, KSI, and even Lil Nas X, it’s likely to have been grouped together within the DreamSMP genre – whether music is their full-time gig or not. Does any of the music sound alike? Not really. Has Spotify united them anyway in the name of a fun Minecraft server? I guess so.
Mystery solved!
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Written by Lucy Graham, Community Manager and now music genre detective.
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