The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped

I joined Spotify, the Swedish streaming service, toward the end of 2020, spending the better part of a Sunday transferring my Apple Music library and local files onto the platform. I had nothing against Apple Music—I was even a little sad to leave it. I’d been using iTunes since 2004, and, in 2016, when I could no longer resist the possibility of streaming every song ever made at any moment, I incorporated the service into my library of torrented MP3s and uploaded CDs. When I ultimately jumped ship, it was because I felt like I had no other choice: my friends all used Spotify, and I couldn’t access their collaborative playlists or shared links to albums and songs, nor could they access mine. What was the point of participating in the streaming economy if I couldn’t enjoy the experience with others, seemingly doomed to wander the halls of recorded music history alone? My favorite forms of musical exchange had always been rooted in discovery and community, which was why I’d spent much of my conscious life listening to college-radio stations, frequenting now-shuttered record stores, and trading burned CDs with friends in my high school’s hallways. Spotify, with its much vaunted algorithms, had usurped these old modes of finding new music and promised something greater: a centralized hub where the entirety of one’s discovery and listening could occur.

There was another carrot that convinced me to convert: Spotify Wrapped, the app’s annual offering of shareable slides that numerically documented a user’s year in listening. In December, 2020, five years into the wildly popular online event, my Instagram and Twitter feeds were flooded with friends showcasing their Spotify data. Across brightly colored backdrops and goopy graphics, subscribers shared their top-streamed artists and songs, their to-the-minute listening totals, and the number of genres they explored. These statistics were intended to communicate a person’s unique taste and curatorial acumen, providing a coherent narrative to the often random experience of consuming music online. As an Apple Music user, I felt alienated from these public demonstrations of fandom and artistic interest, and I wanted in. I was also, admittedly, curious as to what story Spotify would tell about my listening habits. Would my data clarify something specific and singular about me that I could then share with others? I wanted to be seen as the type of guy who listens to sixty thousand minutes of Sade and Pharoah Sanders, Brevin Kim and Arthur Russell, Young Thug and Stereolab. And, in my first few years of using Spotify, Wrapped mostly delivered. The feature did what it was intended to do: hold up a mirror to my listening life and congratulate me for a job well done

This year, Spotify Wrapped has been savaged by its own users for its uninspired presentation and a lack of personalization. Across social media, and in reports throughout traditional media, people have expressed annoyance at the abrupt appearance of new A.I. features, which include a podcast “delivered using generative AI by two dynamic hosts” and a slideshow of head-scratching phrases aimed to characterize a user’s “Music Evolution” throughout the year. (Most people, if they listened to a Charli XCX or Sabrina Carpenter song, were told that one of their evolutionary months was “Pink Pilates Princess Vogue Pop.”) The main event was still the reveal of one’s top five artists and songs, but even this feature was met with disappointment, as Reddit and TikTok users alleged that Spotify’s stats were distorted and inaccurate. (There is no demonstrated validity to this claim.) Some of this might be owing to confusion over how Spotify has chosen to present certain findings; many listeners were disturbed, for instance, to discover that their Top 100 playlist, generated for them by the app, appeared in an order inconsistent with what they believed it should be. The bulk of the blame for these flaws is being fairly directed at Daniel Ek, Spotify’s billionaire C.E.O., who laid off seventeen per cent of the company’s workforce last December. Spotify claims to offer consumers a highly personalized but still communal space to encounter, celebrate, and support art, but its product and corporate strategy aggressively belie these goals. Spotify facilitates a music-distribution model inhospitable to working musicians—according to a Times article published in 2021, industry estimates put Spotify’s payout rate at less than half a cent per stream—and an in-app experience that makes any listening not reliant on algorithmic recommendation a burden. To dispirited fans, Spotify Wrapped suddenly seems less like an honoring of personal taste and more an ingenious user-generated content farm that benefits the bottom line and brand recognition of a corporation chiefly concerned with profit margins and squashing its competition.

What Spotify emphasizes most in Wrapped is how much time a person spends on the app. On my personalized A.I.-generated podcast, the bots expressed amazement at how much music I listen to. “That’s some serious dedication,” one of them said. “It really shows you’re not just putting on background music,” the other added. (Notably, the app doesn’t track listening data for local files.) Similarly, the “Music Evolution” feature is designed to highlight the diversity of one’s musical taste, with the intention of making each individual user feel seen and special while somehow producing the opposite effect. These “innovations” raise an obvious question: Does Spotify assume users will be moved by a customized A.I. podcast, or find the “Pink Pilates Princess” caption cheekily self-reverential? Was September really my “Liminal Instrumental Ambient season,” or did I just fall asleep to a Grouper album on an airplane? And why would I be impelled to hear a synthetic voice discuss what percentile of Mk.gee fan I was in? Who are these features hoping to persuade, and how could they succeed at persuading anyone? When social-media users and tech reporters, en masse, spurned this year’s Wrapped, the referendum had an air of epiphany: was knowing how many minutes we listened to music worth all the data mining and craven appeals to our vanity?

But attention, of any kind, is a win for Spotify. “The goal of Wrapped, in particular, is brand virality,” Glenn McDonald, a former data alchemist at Spotify, told Kyndall Cunningham of Vox. “There’s not much in the way this year of data storytelling.” Previous Wrapped features didn’t tell much of a story, either. 2021’s “Audio Aura” assigned a color gradient and two adjectives to each user’s taste; 2023’s “Sound Town” identified a part of the world aligned with a listener’s most-streamed artists. (It seemed like a shocking number of people were given Burlington, Vermont.) In the past, Spotify’s corporate messaging for Wrapped has focussed on its commitment to intimacy and honesty. “Spotify’s Head of Global Marketing Experience Explains Why This Year’s Wrapped Is the Realest Yet,” a headline from last year’s campaign read; “the songs we listen to and the playlists we create are reflections of us,” the 2021 Wrapped press release claimed. This year, however, Spotify has marketed Wrapped primarily through the lens of A.I., asserting that their state-of-the-art tools make the app experience more human. (“AI Experiences Make Your 2024 Wrapped Even More Personal,” a promotional headline on Spotify’s Web site declared.)

Under these pretenses, Wrapped is an abject failure, a cheap magic trick that momentarily distracts you from the gun being held to the back of your head. Similar to other year-end events, like Goodreads’s Year in Books and Letterboxd Wrapped, Spotify Wrapped promises to help shape and clarify a person’s taste level, one’s passion for art being fostered by the gracious hand of Big Streaming. Our dependence on apps like Spotify, with their ever-increasing subscription rates and surveillance mechanisms feels especially dire in a market short on good alternatives. Spotify, like Amazon and Meta, has become indispensable to the global economic and cultural order. Frustrated users looking to find a new music-streaming service won’t find an ethical reprieve in competing conglomerates: Apple, Amazon, and Google (which owns YouTube Music). Pick your poison, I guess. So when Spotify inevitably fails to deliver on the promise of being everything users need it to be—a record collection, an archive, a jukebox, a merch bar, a book of burned CDs, liner notes, FM radio, MTV, our favorite magazine, a conversation with a friend—listeners feel betrayed and existentially destabilized. If we can’t trust the apps to tell us a meaningful story about our art consumption, how will anyone, including ourselves, ever discover the idiosyncratic composition of our inner lives?

As is consistent across American life, the only way to hold a corporation like Spotify accountable for its inequitable distribution model and odious use of A.I. is to deny it access to your wallet and personal data. But then what? Physical media is all but dead, and independent artists and niche subcultures are flailing to survive within the pay-to-play economy. More than ever, opting out feels less of a possibility and more of an idea you sometimes play with to pretend like you’re still an autonomous person. But if we want to protect the sacred place within us that can’t be commodified or killed, we’ll have to envision alternative modes of consumption and curation outside the algorithm. ♦