Spotify Wrapped 2024: The Good and The Brat

Photo via Spotify.

When Spotify started its annual Wrapped marketing campaign in 2016 — which provides users with yearly personalized listening statistics —it helped differentiate the company from other streaming platforms. Every year since, the buzz for users’ end-of-year Wrapped builds up in the fall as people are eager to post the social media-friendly graphics that Spotify generates. Users even joke that they can finally listen to their “cringey” music after Wrapped is released. 

However, upon the release of the 2024 Spotify Wrapped, enthusiasm quickly plummeted. In previous years, Spotify’s detailed metrics and creative outputs were lauded, but this year’s release was perceived as disappointing, lukewarm, and lacking in creativity. 

Photo via Spotify Wrapped.

Some of the typical statistics provided each year include a shareable slide with users’ top five artists, songs and their total minutes listened. Spotify also includes the total number of artists and songs listened to, and which percentage of listeners users were in for their respective top artist and song. However, these are all standard streaming service data points — YouTube and Apple Music did the same.

Every year, Spotify unveils a brand new feature in their Wrapped. Last year, users were presented with their “music town” — the international city that most aligned with their listening habits. These unique labels allowed strangers to relate over social media.

This year’s new feature was the inclusion of users’ “music evolution” — an individual’s unique genre changes over the months. However, this more nuanced statistic was overshadowed by the strange genre names Spotify generated. I personally was a victim of “Pink Pilates Princess Hollywood Afrobeats.” Some of the strangest examples I encountered were “Coastal Grandmother Fingerstyle Yacht Rock,” “Funny Rhythm Games Battle Rap,” and “Vlog Popping Future Bass”.

My first question is, what does any of that mean? And second, these strange genre names were generated only for the Spotify Wrapped slideshow, meaning I can’t find new music or look into these “genres” further. Additionally, the actual presentation of the interface was unwieldy; users spent too much time watching the poorly made and time-consuming animations just to be presented with lackluster data. 

Spotify has access to an abundance of listening data from its users, but prioritized the production of arbitrary trends over creative, informative analytics this year.

The Spotify Wrapped release of 2024 is hopefully not an indication of streaming services’ shift towards focusing on easily consumable content. Hopefully Spotify takes note of users’ disappointments and provides more meaningful data in future Wrapped releases. If nothing else, maybe Spotify will release more sensical genre titles.