This article was initially published in the Fall 2024 magazine.
December is here, along with the time when the world comes together to celebrate the joys experienced throughout the year. I speak, of course, of Spotify Wrapped.
First released in December 2016, Spotify Wrapped is a viral marketing campaign created by Spotify where users receive statistics of their listening habits throughout the year, including their top five most-played songs, artists and genres, all packaged together in a graphic ready to hit social media. Users also receive a playlist of their top 100 songs of the year.
However, there has been an undeniable taint to Spotify Wrapped’s release this year. It goes beyond users complaining about Spotify Wrapped being late by a month this year, or because Apple Music released their Wrapped-inspired Apple Replay first. In this year’s case, Spotify Wrapped’s tainted energy comes from the mixed reception since its release on Dec. 4.
To begin, Spotify users are claiming that their top 100 songs stats are skewed or just incorrect. This issue ranges from a few unlikely songs here and there to users alleging that songs that appeared in their Spotify Wrapped were songs that they had never listened to before. The prevalence of these strange and incorrect statistics are confounded by a discovery from a user on X, formerly known as Twitter, who discovered that Spotify organized users’ top 100 songs in the wrong order, and then promptly disabled the feature to reorder them correctly.
Users have also been discussing the visuals of this year’s Spotify Wrapped. Many agreed that this year’s visuals were boring or just plain bad, from simple colors and boring block patterns to the unfortunate graphic revealing your top song.
Additionally, many users also pointed out that Spotify Wrapped did not include any fun or interesting statistics this year as opposed to Wrapped in the recent past. Even the top 5 genre statistic has been replaced by the far more dull “2024 Music Evolution,” which seems to only cover about 3 months and boasts confusing, artificial genres such as “witchy rhythm games classic rock,” “alien grind deathcore,” or “pink pilates princess,” the latter of which is becoming a meme. These “genres” do little more than generalize music into inaccurate and largely meaningless categories.
According to Spotify, they combined “machine learning with human curation” to create these word salads. This, along with reports of massive employee lay-offs at the company, only fueled the speculation that Spotify heavily relied on AI during this year’s wrapped round-up. For the first time, Spotify Wrapped has collaborated with Google’s NotebookLM to introduce “Your Wrapped AI Podcast,” where two artificial intelligence (AI) voices read the text of your Spotify Wrapped graphics, almost making you miss this year’s terrible visuals.
My personal experience with Spotify Wrapped this year falls right between the two extremes. While there are no songs on my Top 100 playlist that I don’t recognize, I definitely noticed some weirdness in my statistics.
According to my Spotify Wrapped, my top fifth artist was the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast. While it is true that I listen to the majority of the show’s songs from over six albums, I don’t remember ever my obsession over these songs having a resurgence. Similarly, no songs from the Crazy-Ex Girlfriend soundtrack appear on my Top 100 playlist.
I also found the Wrapped AI Podcast to be lackluster. As mentioned above, the AI voices essentially just recounted everything I had already seen on my Wrapped graphics, plus bland stock phrases and a few random, non-essential facts about some of my top artists that can be found with basic Google searches. The podcast incorrectly claims that I listened to Shirō Sagisu’s “Neon Evangelion Genesis” soundtracks when in reality I did not, but rather his soundtracks for “Bleach.” In one instance, one of the “hosts” even mispronounces Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ surname as “Hellans.”
Now, I would like to dive into some strange discrepancies in my Music Evolution. Admittedly, I did not get the weirdest genre names. For me, Spotify generated “heist tavern soundtrack,” “witchy rhythm games classic rock,” and “theatrical parody musicals.”
Boris Slavov, Hans Zimmer and John Powell were grouped together for February’s “heist tavern soundtrack.” Nothing is out of the ordinary here, all three of these artists are composers who have done work for movies or video games.
“Witchy rhythm games classic rock” is where my Music Evolution starts to get strange. The artists listed for this one were Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and the Steve Miller Band. Instead of launching into a debate on whether or not Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac should get grouped together, I will point out that there are only two songs by the Steve Miller Band that I listen to regularly: “Space Cowboy” and “Abracadabra.” Neither of these appear in my top 100.
“Theatrical parody musicals” gets even stranger. It is a title that seems to be catered only to one of the artists listed for it, the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast, since all the songs from the show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” are parodies of different genres and artists. It is not a title that applies to Jorge Rivera-Herrans, the creator of EPIC: The Musical, or Anthony Stewart Head, who only has two albums on Spotify, Music for Elevators (which I only found out about when writing this article), and the soundtrack for “Repo! The Genetic Opera,” a musical film that, despite its dystopian aesthetic, is not a parody.
Speaking of Anthony Stewart Head, there has only ever been one song of his that I’ve listened to with any kind of frequency: “Legal Assassin,” one of the songs from “Repo!” And, you guessed it, “Legal Assassin” does not appear on my top 100 playlist.
AI, particularly generative AI, has quickly become a controversial topic in recent years. Spotify has always been rather receptive to AI; even before this year’s Wrapped, Spotify introduced an AI DJ back in 2023. This AI DJ has also been incorporated into Spotify Wrapped 2024. With the inclusion of this, the AI Wrapped Podcast, and the bizarre mistakes in user’s statistics, this raises the question if everything from the visual design to the playlist curation was done by AI. AI work tends to be perceived as soulless and impersonal, the opposite of the unique creativity displayed by the previous iterations of Spotify Wrapped. It speaks to why users en masse are disappointed this year. The disappointment goes deeper than just incorrect statistics.
Either way, the general consensus seems to be that Spotify Wrapped 2024 was lackluster and uncreative. With so many bizarre and disappointing functions, many Spotify users are considering cancelling their Spotify accounts and moving to other apps, such as Apple Music or YouTube Music.
For now, Spotify Wrapped 2025 is a year away, so there is plenty of time for the company to reconsider this year’s creative choices and hopefully come out with a more unique spin for the app’s most beloved tradition.
