The year is coming to a close, and people want one thing: statistics. For the past eight years, the world’s largest music streaming platform has been giving it to them. This year was no different when Spotify Wrapped released on December 4th.
If you aren’t aware, Spotify Wrapped is an annual tradition for users to reflect on their listening habits. It’s always highly anticipated, with millions of people posting their personal predictions, often with a twinge of embarrassment. A popular trend on video platform TikTok is claiming their top artist is “The Creature,” as featured in Spotify Wrapped; “The Creature Feature.” This year, my creature was Jeremy Jordan. I spent 960 minutes listening to his music (Newsies. It was all Newsies), making me in the top 0.5% of his fans.
Although it was so anxiously anticipated, some people were disappointed with Wrapped this year. Not because of their listening habits, but because they just felt a lack of personality this year. Maya Georgi of Rolling Stone called 2024 Wrapped a “lackluster data dump that disgruntled several users online.” Every year, Spotify Wrapped has had some personalized slides unique to that year. From “Sound Town,” a feature comparing your listening to a town’s from around the world, to “Genre Sandwich,” a graphic displaying your top genres and how they stacked up in the form of a playful burger. However, nothing unique is in sight this year. Genres are replaced with seemingly AI attempts at summarizing a dozen songs into one sentence. For example, August was my “Surf Crush Synthesizer New Wave” season. There is an AI podcast available, but it’s not advertised very well, and it just feels like Spotify Wrapped for the blind, providing nothing of value other than a sense of dystopia.
While looking through dozens of angry tweets about Spotify Wrapped, I felt a sense of familiarity. Last year, Petrana Radulovic of Polygon put out a story entitled “Hey Spotify, why the heck am I ‘Provo, Utah’?” In this article, she criticized how Spotify’s aforementioned SoundTown feature only had a few seemingly random towns to choose from, in a tone not dissimilar to Wrapped critics this year. Maybe the problem isn’t Spotify failing to make a unique and engaging Wrapped, but the users failing to appreciate what they have. Youtube discontinued the Rewind, a similar yearly product, in 2019 after 2018’s Rewind became the most disliked video on the entire platform.
Despite varying levels of satisfaction, Spotify Wrapped has launched a cultural phenomenon. Although Spotify was the first to use this format, various online platforms have launched similar year-in-review services. Even Kwik Star, the gas station, had a 2023 review emailed to rewards members.
No matter how you feel about it, Spotify Wrapped, and the dozens taking inspiration from it, are gonna stick around for a while. So plug in some headphones (or drive to your local gas station,) and press play on 2025.
