Spotify Wrapped Falls Flat

People look forward to it every year.

Every December, Spotify pushes out its Wrapped feature, offering a personalized recap of users’ listening habits over the last year.

Spotify Wrapped has become a defining part of streaming music culture.

Listeners eagerly share and compare their most-listened artists, songs, podcasts and more.

Those personalized listening details are juxtaposed with Spotify’s overall listening trends with plenty of media coverage. The top artist of 2024? That’d be Taylor Swift, with 26.6 billion streams around the world.

Listeners were eager for the annual recap this year, and even took notice when its release was delayed. But since Wrapped was pushed out to users, a narrative has emerged that this year’s effort missed the mark.

Listener Wrath for Wrapped

In the past, users looked forward to new and clever Wrapped categories and features, like matching music personality to a town, gamifying listening history, and creating super-sharable graphics of top genres.

This year, Wrapped’s most-touted feature was an AI podcast recapping users’ 2024 listening habits.

The reaction has been less than enthusiastic.

The subpar execution, and outsized focus on AI, has prompted Spotify’s layoffs this time last year to resurface in news coverage and social chatter. It’s tarnished the coverage of what is supposed to be one of Spotify’s defining audience engagement campaigns.

In the past, Spotify Wrapped has served as a prime example of how brands can use customer data and year-end recaps to drive greater engagement and brand loyalty.

This year, Spotify seems to have prioritized its own business priorities over what users value in the feature.

At the same time, Spotify has become a victim of its own success with Wrapped – with each cool new feature, the bar for the next year is raised even higher.