After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.”
Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative data stories that it typically offers — like those that identify your music personality, match you to a town that shares your musical tastes, describe your “audio aura,” or turn your listening history into a game you can share with friends, among other things. Others are upset over the lack of more detailed stats and the exclusion of information they’ve come to expect, like top music genres and top podcasts. Spotify declined to clarify how they decided which features to include.
On X, a number of people are sharing their feedback alongside the #SpotifyWrapped2024 hashtag, where they’re describing this year’s annual review of their listening history as “boring,” a “flop,” “underwhelming,” a “disappointment,” and more. Although this hasn’t stopped people from sharing screenshots of their Wrapped, a scroll through the hashtag currently surfaces more complaints than accolades.
For example, one top post calling Wrapped a flop has over 108K likes as of the time of writing.
This year, Spotify heavily bet on a partnership with Google to turn users’ Wrapped experiences into an AI-powered podcast over the other details and features that have typically made Wrapped so engaging. One Spotify user specifically pointed to the lack of “quirky interactive bits” like the “silly personality assessments,” while another noted the new “Your Music Evolution” feature was “quite strange.” (The latter had repurposed the niche genres Spotify uses for its personalized daily playlist, Daylist, as a way to describe how users’ musical tastes changed throughout the year.)
What Spotify users wanted was the same sort of Top Genre information they had in previous years, the complaints indicate.
Others found that Wrapped didn’t include their Top Podcasts in 2024, but this feature appears to have been offered to some podcast listeners, and not others, posts on X indicate.
Spotify says users must have at least two top shows in order for Top Podcasts to be a part of their Wrapped experience. A show is eligible if the user listened for at least 60 seconds of two unique episodes and listened to the show on two different days throughout the year.
Others said that they couldn’t find their Wrapped 2024 playlist. It does appear in the Wrapped feed in the Spotify app as “Your Top Songs 2024,” but your Wrapped interactive experience itself doesn’t link to the playlist, which may be why some folks have missed it.
The graphics and art design used for Wrapped this year also saw mixed reviews, as some described them as “mid,” “really simple,” and much worse, though others expressed liking them.
The AI podcast also had a mixed reception. Those who hadn’t come across Google’s NotebookLM before were impressed by the technology, though some expressed a feeling of unease with the feature. Spotify likely hoped users would share their AI podcasts on social video apps like TikTok but, instead, a perusal of the #SpotifyWrapped hashtag on the app shows many complaints about the feature didn’t live up to the hype this year, with some suggesting AI was to blame.
In addition, a number of users connected their disappointment with Wrapped to Spotify’s earlier layoffs, guessing that this year’s downgrade had to do with the lack of staffing combined with an overreliance on AI. The company let go of 2,300 people in 2023 which CEO Daniel Ek said had impacted day-to-day operations more than expected.
Although a year-end feature, Wrapped is a part of Spotify’s day-to-day operations to some extent, as the company told press earlier this week it has already begun work on next year’s Wrapped. Teams from across the company contribute to the effort, including marketing, product, music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more. Spotify declined to say how many people work on Wrapped, however.
When asked for comment on how it decided what to include in Wrapped this year, Spotify simply said, “Every year we look to bring a new and exciting experience to Wrapped for listeners. It’s part of the secret sauce of Wrapped.”