Spotify Wrapped: What Happened?

Spotify Wrapped: What Happened?

Overview

Spotify Wrapped is basically an overview on everything you listen to on Spotify every year. It consists of: the total minutes you listened to on spotify this year, your biggest listening day this year, amount of songs you played this year, and more. But some people thought Spotify used AI so that’s why it took a little later than usual for Spotify Wrapped to come out. Before we talk about those allegations, let’s switch our view over to everything the Spotify Wrapped 2024 had. 

Spotify Wrapped 2024

Spotify Wrapped this year came out later than usual but it did give out great stats for everybody. It also gave people a “Spotify Wrapped 2024 Playlist” which consisted of your top 100 songs you streamed this year. I’ll discuss my own Spotify Wrapped 2024 stats as well. 

• The amount of minutes you’ve listened to this year: I’ve listened to 13,628 minutes this year

• Your biggest listening day with the amount of minutes you listened to that day: My biggest listening day was November 2 with 437 minutes.

• The total amount of songs you’ve played this year: I’ve played 471 songs this year

• The total amount of minutes you listened to podcasts this year: N/A; I didn’t listen to podcasts this year

• Your top five podcasts this year: N/A; I didn’t listen to podcasts this year

• Your top song this year and the top percent of listeners to this song globally: My top song was “Don’t” by Bryson Tiller and I was in the top 0.005% of listeners globally

• The amount of streams you played on your top song and when you first started listening to it: I streamed “Don’t” by Bryson Tiller 142 times and started on May 25, 2024

• Your top five songs: My top five songs were:

1. Don’t by Bryson Tiller
2. She by Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean
3. Like That! by Laila!
4. No Idea by Don Toliver
5. boyfriend (with Social House) by Ariana Grande and Social House

• Your phases for specific months and the artists that you were into at that time: February: My Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop phase; I was really into artists like Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, and WILLOW. April: My Mcbling Ice Skating 90s Pop season; I was all about artists like Christina Aguilera, Sixpence None The Richer, and Spice Girls. September: My Softie Slow Dance R&B moment; I was big on artists like SZA, Daniel Caesar, and Kaash Paige

• The total number of artists you listened to this year: I’ve listened to 279 artists this year

• Your top artist and your longest listening streak with them this year: My top artist this year was Frank Ocean and my longesting listening streak with him was 15 days.

• The top percent fan of your top artist and the number of minutes you listened to them: I’m a top 1% fan of Frank Ocean and I spent 1,889 minutes listening to him

• Your top artists: My top artists were:

1. Frank Ocean
2. Tyler, The Creator
3. Ariana Grande
4. Melanie Martinez
5. Bryson Tiller

The Differences/Artificial Intelligence Allegations

Online, people noticed a bunch of differences between Spotify Wrapped 2024 and Spotify Wrapped 2023. They also started pointing out that the Spotify Wrapped this year released in December rather than November, which was when it usually released. Here are the differences from this year to last year that the Spotify community noticed. 

1. It didn’t say the total number of genres you’ve listened to this year
2. It didn’t show your top five genres of the year
3. It didn’t show your top five albums of the year
4. It didn’t show the place where most people listened to your favorite artists
5. It didn’t show you a video of your favorite artists thanking their fans for everything
6. It didn’t show a chart of months and the summary of how much you listened to your top five artists in the year. 

As you can see, Spotify instead gave a “Music Evolution” to people rather than top five genres and this wasn’t a good choice at all. These “genres” based on the artists you listened to that month seemed like it was made by AI because they were just random words with the same vibe bunched together. People also speculated that Spotify relied more on AI rather than their actual team and what the users wanted. To add, many people also thought that the AI made up their stats and lied about the amount of minutes they listened to on Spotify, I agree with this too. As a result, Spotify even made their own AI podcast and the Spotify community thought this was downgrading and bad. 

To Be Honest..

This year was pretty disappointing, I was expecting a better wrapped and I honestly think it was wrong. For 2023, I had almost 4,000 minutes listened in total and I have had Spotify since July 2023. So for this year being only almost 14,000 minutes was kind of disappointing to say the least. I definitely listened for more than 13,628 minutes since I played music all the time and I had three playlists dedicated to my Spotify Wrapped 2024. Additionally, when converting minutes to days, I discovered that I basically listened to music less than 3% of this entire year. 

Technically, in total, I listened to almost 10 days worth of music which is such a lie because I listened to music on the bus, in the car, and during class when we’re allowed to. I always play music when I’m doing homework or when I’m bored and writing a story. This AI thing that Spotify has done for their wrapped was not the best and they should definitely do it like last year. Additionally, many users, especially on TikTok, didn’t like how their wrapped changed from everything about your music taste to everything important. Hence, we care more about the little things and many of Spotify’s users wanted the same thing as last year, not something bland. 

To end this article off, other apps like Google Photos, TikTok, and Snapchat now do their own wrapped which is not good in my opinion. They should’ve stuck to their own ideas and not have copied what Spotify has done for the last 8 years. Spotify also could’ve done the same thing and stuck to what people loved about the wrapped last year. They didn’t need to use AI to make their Spotify Wrapped “better”, they just had to do what was generally right. As a result, other apps could’ve just stuck to anything they did and they didn’t have to copy for people to love the apps more.

Wait, this isn’t about apps, isn’t it?..

Works Cited

Aimee, Rachel. “It’s been long enough. Spotify Wrapped 2024 sucked. Here’s why.” Still Listening. December 6, 2024. https://www.stilllisteningmagazine.com/features/spotify-wrapped-2024 Accessed December 18, 2024

Placido, Di Dani. “Spotify Wrapped 2024: Backlash, Controversy and Memes” Forbes. December 5, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/12/05/spotify-wrapped-2024-backlash-controversy-and-memes/ Accessed December 18, 2024