When Spotify started teasing its annual music recap, Spotify Wrapped 2024, I, along with music fans around the world, found pleasure in decoding the music streamer’s clues online. But when Spotify Wrapped 2024 dropped yesterday (December 4), that excitement evaporated. As one of the best music streaming services, Spotify, you had one job.
Since yesterday, music fans have been taking to platforms such as TikTok to express disappointment with Spotify Wrapped 2024’s lazy approach to its yearly music roundup. Compared to last year’s Wrapped roll-out, this year didn’t pack the same innovative features and instead churned out a bunch of AI integrations that, frankly, no one asked for. So, the question remains, what went wrong with Spotify Wrapped 2024?
@juliapags ♬ please please please stop - Thomas Parrish
Personal insights sacrificed for pointless AI
Though it was expected that Wrapped 2024 would have some sort of AI angle, I don’t think subscribers were expecting the volume of AI features it gave us. The more interesting integration was the new Wrapped AI Podcast which did give some additional information about your year in music, but even then it was still very surface-level.
Instead of telling you your top album and listing your top genres of the year, Spotify decided that revamping its AI DJ feature would be enough to suffice - an integration that I’ve come to loathe even outside of Wrapped season. But even this didn’t offer anything different, packing the exact same functions but instead playing your most-streamed songs of the year. With that said, perhaps ‘revamped’ is too strong a term.
Total lack of innovation and creativity
When I compare Spotify Wrapped 2024’s features to last year’s roundup, there’s simply no competition, and this is another thing that music fans have a lot to say about online. One of the biggest shocks was the missed opportunity to bring back the highly successful Sound Town feature - one that I predicted would make a return. Last year, it was one of the most talked about aspects and was the catalyst for all Wrapped-related memes that inundated TikTok and Instagram, so why Spotify didn’t hop on this again this year is baffling.
Sound Town was just one of the features that peeled back the layers of your music-listening persona, and 'Me in 2023' was the icing on that cake. Conjuring 12 different character-specific cards, this unique astrology-themed feature assigned you one persona that defined your listening habit for the whole year. Spotify did that this time, but only for three months out of the year.
When it came to Wrapped’s ‘2024 Music Evolution’ section, an evolution it was not. I was given three different ‘eras’, each with a name mighty similar to the AI-generated Daylists, supposedly tracking my shifting listening behaviors for March, June, and October only. Where’s the effort in that, Spotify?
But what angered music fans, myself included, was the blatant ignorance on Spotify’s part when it came to genre and album statistics. Last year we got the genre sandwich, revealing your top five genres of the year in a groovy visual, but this year the word ‘genre’ wasn’t a part of Spotify’s vocabulary. With not even a smidge of data on your top genres and albums which have been integral to the Spotify Wrapped experience for years, the disappointment from music fans is understandable.
@lilybraendle_ ♬ original sound - lily braendle
Will Spotify learn from its mistake?
The be-all and end-all is that Spotify subscribers genuinely care about genres and albums, as they provide the very foundation of any music identity. It would be foolish if Spotify wasn’t already examining the online discourse and sheer dissatisfaction of Wrapped 2024 and making immediate notes on how to improve for next year, and although the light-hearted and humorous social media memes work in Spotify’s favor for bringing attention to Wrapped, it shouldn’t be the determining factor when it comes to designing a ‘year in music’ roundup.
What I hope Spotify learns is that it doesn’t have to keep reinventing the wheel and that it’s perfectly fine to recycle previous features but with a little twist on them each time. If Sound Town had been brought back for a second year running, it would’ve immediately become an instant classic for Wrapped features - one that doesn’t compromise the personalized aspect of Wrapped. Now that Spotify Wrapped 2024 is behind us, excuse me while I start my Wrapped 2025 tailoring process.
