Spotify, I’m gonna hold your hand when I ask this: WTF happened with this year’s Spotify Wrapped?! The annual Spotify Wrapped end-of-year release is truly like Christmas coming early to me, the one thing I can count on Santa to deliver with no questions asked. To be clear, I have been and will remain Spotify’s biggest fan. No shade to the other audio streamers, but there’s no better musical home base out there than the green guys who help me curate all of my emotional support playlists with ease. That’s why the highlight of 2024’s Wrapped hingeing on an artificial intelligence podcast instead of pointing out the quirky ways music taste makes us different and brings us together all around the world, I was left teetering on the edge of a pop culture crash-out. Is AI to blame for an underwhelming Spotify Wrapped? The internet (and I) have some thoughts.
What is the Spotify Wrapped AI podcast?
spotify wrapped flopped this year so bad like where are the music cities, the playlists, the top genres or the listening auras… all that wait for WHAT #SpotifyWrapped2024 pic.twitter.com/cposhWNURI
— ana (@shivlestat) December 4, 2024
Spotify collaborated with Google on a personalized podcast, which was generated and narrated by AI, to walk premium users through their musical choices for 2024. In their own words, Spotify calls the biggest present of their Wrapped presentation “a personalized Audio Overview” that “fans can immerse themselves in the top songs, artists, and genres that soundtracked their year, all delivered using generative AI by two dynamic hosts.” The idea of a personalized history of my year in music is actually quite lovely. But hearing this content, curated just for me, like “the inspiration behind one of [my] favorite tracks” from an AI bot, somehow feels a little too dystopian core, even after the year we’ve had.
It’s not a completely unheard level of personalization, to be fair. Like when Apple comes up with an automated album of a trip you forgot about a year later. But just like I don’t need to be reminded of that life-threatening hangover in a Dutch airport without a trigger warning, I prefer artistic insights commissioned in my honor to come from the work of an actual artist. Don’t get me wrong, the Spotify algorithm is my best friend when I don’t feel like playing DJ. Some of my favorite days of listening have come from hitting one song and letting the Spotify gods take me where the wind blows. But I think I’d rather listen to a man with a bunch of unfounded opinions talk than reporting and humor generated by a machine, especially after waiting all year. Not to mention as cool as those AI massages, manicures, and portraits y’all are obsessed with can be (okay, maybe not the portraits) we should all be slightly (okay, more than slightly) concerned about the environmental impact of gratuitous AI, in addition to its demonstrated pros.
What was missing from Spotify Wrapped 2024?
another year of spotify wrapped not showing us our top 5 albums pic.twitter.com/2kMa0Twuph
— lucy ⸆⸉ 🐍🪩 (@lucysreputation) December 4, 2024
Last year’s Wrapped really set the bar high by telling users what niche city around the country they belonged in due to their music taste. I have also loved the explosive visuals with elaborate statistics about my listening habits and kooky categorizations like the “audio aura.” In 2024, Spotify graciously generated a “music evolution” feature with three different phases/seasons/moments based on what you were jamming out to that time of year. But can I kindly ask Mr. Spotify why we only got three slides as opposed to, IDK, at least one for every fiscal quarter?!? While I adored being called a “Pink Pilates Princess,” those eras felt pretty close to the Daily Listening playlist titles we get all year round. All in all, 2024 Wrapped felt like it was all about the simple numbers. Personally, I like to depend on gay interns and elder millennial pop culture historians of digital media to deliver the personal touches.
