Since 2016, Spotify users have enjoyed what has now become an annual tradition of sharing their brag-worthy — or unabashedly bad — music taste by way of a yearly recap of their most listened-to songs, albums and artists called Spotify Wrapped. But this year, there have been more than a few complaints that the long-awaited year-end data dump was surprisingly “boring,” and reeking of AI.
As Forbes detailed in their coverage of the criticisms, unlike previous iterations of Spotify Wrapped, and unlike competitors including Apple Music and YouTube Music, Spotify did not tell users their top genres of 2024, which was a letdown for many. Also missing in this year’s roundup was the usual feature telling users their top genres of 2024. And with the added slight of the heavy hand of artificial intelligence, Wrapped may just be a wrap for music nerds from here on out.
“This year, new features for Spotify Wrapped included an AI podcast that breaks down a user’s listening habits, as well as a user’s ‘music evolution,’ though some social media users say they pale in comparison to previous features like a user’s listening personality and the ‘sound town’ feature that told users last year which city aligned with their music taste,” details Forbes writer Conor Murray.
Whereas, in previous years, Spotify Wrapped day resulted in thousands of users posting screenshots of their stats on social media to contrast and compare with others, this year’s posts are more in the tune of “What the hell is this?”
“Spotify Wrapped flopped this year so bad. Like where are the music cities, the playlists, the top genres or the listening auras… all that wait for WHAT?” Wrote one angry user in a post to X.
“Spotify making us wait all that time and Wrapped has the most boring visuals and slideshow in years,” writes another.
One person who likely has zero issue with Wrapped this year, however, is Taylor Swift. According to year-end Spotify stats, she is once again the platform’s most-streamed artist, ranking in more than 26.6 billion streams.
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