“Keep in mind, our AI hosts may occasionally mispronounce words and don’t always provide a comprehensive overview, but we hope you enjoy this first-ever personalized podcast for your year in Music,” the app said in a news release.
Users seemed underwhelmed by the new feature as it premiered Wednesday. Ali Amir, who lives in London, said Wrapped lost its charm in the race to use AI — which, she said, no one wanted.
“This year’s Spotify Wrapped feels rushed and detached,” she said. “The truth is that Spotify Wrapped is becoming obsolete,” she added, citing services that track music preferences, such as Receiptify and Last.fm.
Amir, 23, said the AI podcast is a slap in the face to artists who are struggling to profit off the app.
“For time and money to be wasted on something like an AI podcast further hammers the neglect of artists on Spotify’s platform,” she said. “Why waste money on AI when artists have been begging to be paid more by this company?”
Cierra Gaines, from Pembroke Pines, Florida, said this year’s Spotify Wrapped was less impressive than she’d hoped.
“Last year’s Spotify Wrapped had more heart,” she said. “I miss some of the elements that last year had.”
Gaines, 24, said she thought the AI podcast was “weird.”
“While it’s cool, it’s very creepy,” she said. “It sounds so real and just hearing it say my name is just wild. Personally, it was unnecessary for me, but, for the times, I can see how it would be necessary to jump on that trend.”
First launched in 2015, Spotify Wrapped breaks down the music and podcast listening histories of every user’s Spotify account, offering information about people’s top artists, songs, podcasts and more. The 12-month recap has become an online phenomenon as users share and compare their results — and sometimes feel anxiety over what the app will reveal.
Wrapped has become known of late for adding new types of user feedback each year. In 2022, Spotify assigned a “listening personality type” to users based on their listening habits. In 2023, the app assigned a “sound town,” locating an area that best resembled the genre of music people listened to the most.
As part of its unveiling of Wrapped, Spotify released information about the app’s most popular music in 2024. Taylor Swift was named the most popular global artist for the second year in a row, with more than 26 billion streams. Swift also has the top spot for the most streamed album of the year, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” Sabrina Carpenter’s summer hit “Espresso” was the most streamed song this year. “The Joe Rogan Experience” was the No. 1 podcast of the year globally.
Google partnered with Spotify even though it owns YouTube Music, a rival music streaming service. YouTube Music has recently experimented with its own AI feature, Ask Music, which generates its own AI prompt-based conversational radio.
The Spotify Wrapped AI podcast is available only in English for eligible free and premium subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Sweden. The podcast follows Spotify’s recent forays into AI uses, such as AI DJ and AI Playlist, which provide AI-made commentary and playlists based on user data.
Edward Bilous, the founding director of Juilliard’s Center for Creative Technology, says Spotify is always looking for new ways to monetize its data.
“I don’t think it really has anything to do with music,” he said of Spotify Wrapped. “It’s not so much about selling records or promoting artists as it is about social preferences and age groups and demographics and other sides of things.”
Bilous says modern music listening has prioritized the individualized experience, rather than the community experience that used to be prevalent. People more frequently listen to music alone in the car or through headphones rather than in a shared space.
“Spotify allows a user to kind of curate a personal image and a personal identity,” he said. “Now everybody has a soundtrack to their own lives. That’s not something that was really possible before.”
Wrapped is evidence of just how much personal data the music app is tracking, but users don’t seem to mind, said Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music.
“It’s a very smart move by Spotify,” Bennett said. “Rather than being aggrieved in any way that our personal data is being collected, we are sharing it and celebrating it.”
Bennett, who researches popular music and songwriting, has two 20-something-year-old daughters who told him that they were eagerly anticipating the release of Spotify Wrapped this year. As a music professor, he said, his Spotify algorithm is overloaded with music he listens to for work rather than for fun.
“Our music says so much about our personalities,” he said. “I think it’s very clever in the way it collects data that you’re not necessarily collecting yourself in real time. You’re not aware in the moment if you’re listening to more Taylor Swift than Ed Sheeran, or more Cardi B than Kendrick [Lamar].”
Bennett, 55, said that he believes he’s “pretty tech-literate for a middle-aged person,” but that he’s still skeptical. The use of an AI podcast to broadly analyze music data can trick the mind into believing this is a legitimate social interaction, he suggested.
“It’s almost the ultimate echo chamber, because you’re not going to disagree with any analysis you hear in this podcast,” he said. “You’re basically just getting a description of your own activity in a fake social interaction beamed back at you.”
