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Spotify Wrapped Or Loosened? Spotify Wrapped 2024 and Why It Felt Different

Music & Podcasts

Mon, January 13

In this electronic day and age, it’s hard not to have a music addiction. Millions utilize various music platforms each and every day to satisfy their melodic cravings, the most popular streaming platform being Spotify. Launched in 2008, Spotify has garnered more than 574 million users worldwide according to Spotify Newsroom, providing listeners with over 100 million tracks, 5 million podcast titles, and 350,000 audiobooks.

The most notable feature of Spotify, however, is its annual “Spotify Wrapped”, where users are able to look back and reflect on their listening activities. Every year from late November to early December, users wait with bated breath for Spotify to release several statistics including, but not limited to how much time the user has spent listening on Spotify, top genres, top artists, and top songs.

Over the years, Spotify Wrapped has become more curated. In 2022, the wrap incorporated the listener’s average “musical moods” throughout the day and “music type”, a play on the Myer Briggs Socionic sixteen personality types. These caricatures consisted of “Familiarity vs.

Exploration”, “Timelessness vs. Newness”, “Loyalty vs. Variety”, and “Commonality vs. Uniqueness”, as opposed to Myer Briggs’ “Extrovert vs. Introvert”, “Sensor vs. Intuitive”, “Thinker vs. Feeler”, and “Judger vs. Perceiver”. This left the listener with a four-letter characterization, allowing them to sum up their entire listening experience in 2022 as an “ENLU” or an “FTVC”, for example.

In 2023, Spotify Wrapped presented its users with a character card that best encapsulated their listening habits throughout the year. These included: Vampire, Alchemist, Time Traveler, Cyclops, Luminary, Mastermind, Roboticist, Shapeshifter, Collector, Hunter, Fanatic, and Hypnotist. A listener who’s card revealed them to be a “Time Traveler” would be told by Spotify, “Have we met before?

You travel back in time and listen to songs on repeat, again and again. The best tracks never get old,” while a “Cyclops” would receive the message, “ When it comes to your listening, you’re loyal and devoted. You like to focus on one genre. Sometimes while wearing a monocle.”

Yet, this year’s Spotify Wrapped feels a little different. Highly anticipated and released much later than any other wrapped from previous years, the great disappointment of 2024 Spotify Wrapped was felt globally. While many speculated this to be due to the firing of many members of Spotify’s Wrapped team – including their lead product and motion designers – others felt that the dullness of Wrapped was due to the uprise and soulless nature of AI use and design.

This year Spotify Wrapped included a look into a user’s listening taste phases as it labeled January as “your Lovecore Beach Indie phase” and July as “your Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop phase”. While it was different for every user, it was not unfamiliar. Spotify introduced “Daylists” in September of 2023, which is a curated playlist that updates every few hours, meant to introduce users to new music.

These playlists had names like, “Bouncy Heatwave Sunday Morning” and “Journaling Yearning Thursday Afternoon”. Thus users simply felt like this year’s Spotify Wrapped was nothing remotely new or interesting, and even had users scornfully criticizing the seemingly AI-generated titles of these music listening “phases”.

This calls into question the nature of AI use in this present day, because the fact of the matter is that Spotify has been using artificial intelligence for the past few years now, whether to curate their algorithm or in preparation for Spotify Wrapped. This use has simply gone undetected or remained uncommented on, as the public wasn’t well versed in the technology.

Today, the average person can easily access AI and we are able to see the quality of work AI has been able to produce, leading the use of AI by major companies to be deemed as derogatory and an act of laziness to cut costs.

Spotify Wrapped has become an annual occurrence, much like Christmas or Black Friday, anticipated by many, and to be shared by all, from celebrities like Madison Beer to your average Joe. It’s due to the looming presence of Spotify Wrapped that listeners will stream solely one artist that they hope will be their top listened artist.

While some begin the frenzy in the dwindling month of November, many consistently have Spotify’s statistic-collecting nature in the back of their minds, and refuse to stream anything, besides say, Sabrina Carpenter. In fact, it has been seen as quite an accomplishment to be able to reach the top 0.05% of any given artist’s listeners.

Spotify Wrapped is a glance into our societal values and an accumulation of valuing the general consensus and general norms. Music taste can be viewed as an extension of one’s self and personality, and for that to be shown wholly and unfiltered to the world, or say even just peers, is scary for anyone; thus, the careful curation of music streamed to show, at the end of the year, a societally agreeable Spotify Wrapped speaks volumes about our innate human desire to fit in.

Music throughout the years has been a form of individualism and self-expression, and through the publicity of Spotify Wrapped, it has been somewhat dampened.

While it’s typically frowned upon to be the top listener of a strange unknown indie artist, it is also frowned upon to be “basic”, having a top artist of Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar. Everyone wants to fit in, yet no one wants to be basic and just like everyone else: a paradoxical situation.

It’s due to the insight Spotify allows into listening habits from the past year, that users are able to reflect and reminisce on their entire year. They may remember a rough time when they saw the abundant hours of Spotify deemed “Sad Girl Music” streamed; they may cry when they see a song that once meant the world to them. They may realize they have a music addiction when they see they stream more music than 94% of all Spotify users. It’s due to these insights that we are able to really see what lies inside.

Riesling Liu

Writer since Sep, 2024 · 2 published articles

Riesling Liu is a current junior at the Awty International School. She's a two time national gold medalist winner of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In her free time, she enjoys anything creative - whether it be writing, art, film, music, or photography.

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