Look, I did listen to Bruce Springsteen in 2024, but mostly in November, when I was looking for a song for a karaoke night that required singers to choose sad songs. “The River” is sad!
Yet when my Spotify Wrapped dropped, it placed a different Springsteen song in my top five — a song I knew I didn’t play more often than several others this year.
Turning to — Where else? — Reddit, it seemed I wasn’t alone. Several users expressed:
- Disappointment in Spotify Wrapped’s lackluster presentation, which skipped previous fave features like genre data and “Sound Town,” which connected users to cities with similar tastes.
- Confusion at weird genres like “pink pilates princess” and “vampire football rap.”
- Suspicion that their listening data was off, including top artists they never listened to.
One user suggested checking this website instead, which, at least in my experience, does offer a far more realistic picture of my top listens over the past 12 months.
So, what happened?
Users speculate that Spotify’s reliance on AI combined with layoffs that impacted 25% of its staff had something to do with it.
Instead of beloved features, Spotify partnered with Google on a poorly received Wrapped AI podcast featuring two bots rambling about users’ listening habits. Some users claimed theirs were wrong or offensive.
Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify engineer, told Business Insider that Wrapped had always been a marketing exercise. He’d pushed for more human elements, but suggested that after layoffs, remaining engineers didn’t bother.
Yet if what Spotify wants is social media virality, it succeeded: This year’s Wrapped scored a “record number of individual shares,” per a company spokesperson.
But…
… while Wrapped has served as a clever way to gain brand awareness and new users — it led to a 21% jump in app downloads in the first week of December 2020 — it has competition from the likes of YouTube, Apple, Amazon, and smaller platforms, like Tidal and Deezer.
If Wrapped leans into AI slop over communal listening experiences users want to share, they could be swayed to alternative platforms that pick up the slack.
