Debatably the most important—and unpredictable—holiday in December, this year’s Spotify Wrapped Day fell on Dec. 4.
Technically, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Hanukkah remain the most celebrated December holidays in the United States. However, the possibility of Spotify Wrapped Day becoming one of the Big Three shouldn’t be overlooked. Currently being on an all-time high, the company has 65 million U.S. members and counting—the majority of which enthusiastically wait for the arrival of their end-of-year listening data.
For those unfamiliar, Spotify Wrapped is a presentation the massive company releases detailing listeners’ past year in music and podcasts. Curated in a highly-anticipated, color-saturated presentation, users are shown their top artists, songs, and podcasts, among other pieces of data.
The program began in 2016, and, since then, Wrapped has evolved to include more than just barebones statistics. Within the past few years, Spotify has tried out various slightly odd ways to describe listening habits. In 2023, this meant listener cards telling users their personas (I was a vampire) and, in 2022, listening personalities (I earned the title of The Early Adopter).
This year, one of Wrapped’s unique features is their AI podcast. While Spotify has created a few beneficial AI features for their app in the past, this innovation falls short.
The podcast is essentially two robot personalities detailing listeners’ Wrappeds in an oddly conversational way. These mini-episodes contain a few standard AI mistakes—for me, this meant numbers that were slightly off from my actual Wrapped and a mispronunciation of “Kesha” as “Keesha”—but they sound realistic overall.
Even though I love to see Spotify finding new ways to enhance listening experiences, the podcast is superfluous. The same data is already available in the standard Wrapped presentations, so why do we need to listen to voices creepily conversing about us in the second person? The AI characters make sure to paint a mental picture of me listening to soft-academia music while curling up with a good book in the fall and compliment me excessively—both of which I find more creepy than cool. Their praise sounds like an attempt to trick me into buying a product, not to share data with me.
Another new feature Wrapped includes is a music evolution section. In this, listeners are given “niche” moods to describe their months of the year. For example, I apparently had a “Sweater Weather Permanent Wave Indie” March and an “Indie Sleaze Strut Pop” September. While not exactly the same, these expressions bear resemblance to the moods—like “Nervous Bittersweet Yearning”—that categorized times of day in 2022.
At first glance, these statements seem to be oddly specific, but they’re—unfortunately—pretty generalized. In particular, every other person seems to have had a “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop” month at some point this year.
Even though their lack of distinctiveness is eye-roll worthy, the bizarre phrases actually create bonds between listeners. With the extent to which everyone (I mean that almost literally) posts their Wrapped on social media, users band together over shared results. Specifically for the Pink Pilates Strut Pop persona, many have bonded over Spotify recognizing their unapologetic pop music tastes. In addition, posting videos of curated outfits, crocheted projects, and other DIY-ed creations based on the different phrases has become yet another way Wrapped has taken over the internet.
While these descriptive phrases are easy ways to make Wrapped more exciting, they replace one of the best features of 2023’s Wrapped. Last year, listeners were informed the months of the year in which they most heavily listened to each of their top five artists. In 2024, these “quirky” statements fill the spot of the concrete listening data that was—subjectively—much more interesting.
On a similar note, this year’s Wrapped included fewer statistics than in 2023. With around 626 million monthly active users, Spotify has been put under some harsh criticism from its devoted fanbase. Inevitably, people will complain regardless of how Wrapped looks, but there is a particularly fierce annoyance this year. Most notably, users are irritated that the company omitted their top genre data. Even though genres are less crucial than top artists or songs, they have still been a consistent Wrapped inclusion up until this year.
In addition to the genre statistics, Spotify should bring back some of its one-off features from previous years. In 2021, for example, listeners were given a true-or-false question about their listening activity, an interactive element that could be brought back next year. In addition, the 2023 match of listeners with a world city (my personal favorite feature) should return. In this, users were given a city that had the most similar listening activity to theirs. This meant that I was apparently most compatible with Burlington, VA. Appearing like they had a rough year, the city was a big supporter of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and boygenius.
While this is likely a security breach on Spotify’s part, it would be fascinating if a user compatibility feature could be added in 2025. Instead of telling listeners cities that have similar musical tastes to theirs, users could be matched with real people who most closely shared listening habits. This is unlikely to be brought into effect, but I will continue to petition this idea for the 4th consecutive Wrapped all the same.
Holiday jokes and next year speculations aside, Spotify Wrapped has become blown a bit out of proportion. To be clear, I anticipate the arrival of my listening statistics just as much as the next music fanatic. Still, the fixation on Wrappeds is slightly concerning—particularly when attempts to alter data come about.
To make statistics “presentable” enough to share with friends, many users make desperate, last-minute attempts to fudge listening data. This involves binge listening to a particular artist or two so they show up in the yearly presentations. Considering this usually happens mere weeks before Spotify stops collecting data, the tactic ranges from debatably successful to impossible, depending on the listener.
Understandably, Wrappeds typically end up revealing some data users aren’t the most proud to share. Because it displays, well, data, the presentations usually indicate on some level how users’ mental states have been. Let’s be honest: nobody actually listened to “Casual” by Chappell Roan casually this year.
While I’m guilty of trying to change my listening data on various occasions, this defeats the whole purpose of Wrapped. The point is to see our raw musical data of the year, even if it’s moderately humbling and somewhat appalling to others.
On the whole, this year’s Wrapped is mediocre. It includes most of the integral statistics while adding few new ones, making it slightly worse than in 2023. Next year, Spotify will hopefully have learned from the criticism it’s receiving and let listeners unwrap more, not less, of their listening data.
