SPOTIFY: UNWRAPPED BUT UNREADY

Users of Spotify awoke on the 4th of December, after a lengthier than average wait, to find their music having been Wrapped for the Christmas tree.

But once we tore off the red ribbon and decorative paper, what we unfortunately found was disappointment. For a seasonal spectacle we all look forward to every year, Spotify Wrapped 2024… fell short.

To recap: every year Spotify gathers each user’s analytics and streaming data to put together a small slideshow of interesting information pertaining to their taste.

What started as a fun way to learn interesting facts about your listening and compare them with friends soon bloomed into a yearly cultural phenomenon, with people eagerly waiting each year to find out their most streamed artist, and reminding each other when Spotify starts and stops counting. Personally, I know Christmas is right around the corner when the Wrapped comes out.

So what was actually in this year’s Wrapped?

THE FEATURES THAT WERE 

Alongside the standard Wrapped analytics – the minutes listened, the number of songs, the top artist; the “bread and butter” of the standard Wrapped – we got a new “music evolution” section, highlighting specific months that indicated a change in taste. On paper this is a good idea. There’s just one problem: the genre categories made absolutely no sense.

Spotify gained a lot of flack in recent years for making up nonsensical genre names. Last year “genres” such as pov: indie and Dream SMP made it onto the leader boards – confusing titles with little to no basis in actual categories of music. This year it got even worse.

For example, apparently in January I was listening to “Royalcore Classical Dark Academia”. Only one of those is an actual music genre, and none of the subsequent listed artists were Classical musicians.

The music might have been slow, romantic, and instrumental, but classical music itself has one of the most rigid definitions in music, constrained from 1750 to 1820 – and I certainly didn’t have Mozart on the playlist.

“Classical” isn’t a catch-all term for music with no lyrics in… and I can make even less sense of the other adjectives. Alas, some people got “pink pilates princess” as their music genre, so I suppose it could have been worse.

There is another glaring problem, this time highlighted in my April music, so categorised as “Theatrical West End Broadway”. The title is so overly flowery it’s painful to read. All of those adjectives could be put under just one category: musicals.

The West End and Broadway are two different cultural districts; one in the USA and one in the UK, both known for their theatres – often used interchangeably with the theatre industry itself for its respective country. Last year was a simple “showtunes” – why did it have to be so complicated?

But aside from the usual statistics and the music evolution section, what else was in the Wrapped?

Well, that’s just it. Nothing.

THE FEATURES THAT WEREN’T

After making users wait an extra week – a whole extra week that people used to build excitement, wondering what was in the Wrapped, and if it was going to be extra special – not did the existing features end up lacklustre, but two sections had been axed (top 5 genres and the music personality placement).

Instead, a “Your Wrapped AI Podcast” feature replaced it, with two poorly-implemented AI assistants having a bizarre, 2 minute conversation about you.

Their vocalisation had the unnatural lilt of a computer trying very hard to sound human, with mispronunciations of popular singers’ names, and an occasional glitch where one of the voices would shriek.

AI is already a contentious issue. Despite generative AI being a deeply flawed and often frustrating service, every tech company wants to get their hands on it.

Spotify had no need for the AI Podcast, and yet replacing two of the main features with it feels suspiciously like Spotify’s producers trying to pivot Wrapped from a slideshow to an AI Podcast – and this was them testing the waters to see how their consumers react.

And the consumers did react. Spotify users criticised the AI Podcast as the flawed and meaningless junk it was, and criticised further the lack of features such as the top 5 genres, top 5 albums, and personality quiz.

Unfortunately the AI Podcast was never going to work, because it does a disservice to a big part of why Wrapped is so popular: sharing your taste with your friends.

Even if the AI assistants had perfect human voices, nobody wants to listen to a clip of two people talking about someone else’s music taste; they’d much rather read a screenshot, or spread it by word-of-mouth.

An annual tradition of Wrapped is posting screenshots to your Instagram and scrolling through your friends’ stories, and with a podcast, that simply isn’t a possibility.

In addition to what isn’t in the Wrapped, there were no additional “fun fact” features either. Last year there was a Sound Town, with Spotify showing us a general location for someone with the most similar music taste to us. It was a fun, interesting tidbit of information, and this year there wasn’t a trace of it.

THE AESTHETICS

Before Spotify released Wrapped 2024, they put out a short advertisement to get everybody excited, featuring the Spotify logo transforming into different objects representative of popular artists and albums of the year, all without ever directly saying the artists’ names.

Sabrina Carpenter’s new album “Short ‘n Sweet” was represented by a little espresso cup with a foamy Spotify logo on top, matching her song named “Espresso”; Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poet’s Department” is the black and white head of a typewriter key with the Spotify logo stamped on; and even newly popular artist Chappell Roan has a logo that matched the aesthetics of her album cover “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”.

It was a genius marketing tactic in a masterclass of “show, don’t tell”, by getting everyone to argue and theorise what logo represented which album.

Further than that – it was well-made. The advertisement team clearly had a talented department of 3D graphics animators that elevated the promotion to a stunning level of detail. It was getting everybody excited.

But come December 4th, Spotify Wrapped aesthetics fell far. They were uncreative; strange, jagged lines serving as bizarre background effects that had lighting, shading, and depth issues – like a prepacked set of animations with no real personality to them.

Before, animations were lively with pops of fireworks and splashes of colour, and cute visuals like the genre lists being displayed as planets in a solar system, or fillings in a sandwich. No such cute visuals were seen this year.

 

 

AND WHY?

All this points to a glaring issue in Spotify’s management: complacency. Late last year in December 2023 they announced some major downsizing, and subsequently laid off 1,500 employees – about 17% of its staff.

One such employee was Glenn McDonald, a key data scientist and software engineer who was in charge of the genre stats. He made this viral post on Bluesky, in which he states:

“Touching to have Spotify celebrate the 1-year anniversary of my layoff by demonstrating that they could not, in fact, still do Wrapped just as well without me.”

This may explain the complete dearth of genre stats this year, as well as the new and strange categories in the Music Evolution section.

The focus on downsizing in pursuit of profit is worrying, as clearly the quality of the service suffered for it.

The real question now is whether they’ll choose to address the backlash and focus on making a quality service that people can be proud to subscribe to, or instead go chasing after record-high profits that will, of course, only be delegated to the top of the company.

But they ought not to be surprised if competitors like Apple and Amazon Music start being favoured by their consumer base.

THIS ARTICLE, WRAPPED

Every year, everyone complains about Spotify Wrapped. Every year there’s claims of the data being wrong; that it’s not like how it used to be; that the Wrapped is going downhill. This is the downside of a yearly event – everyone’s blind to nostalgia.

But 2024’s Wrapped was, without a doubt, a disappointment. They laid off workers and cut corners to compensate in pursuit of profit, and hoped no one would notice.

Unless Spotify’s management lifts their head from profit and complacency, Spotify Wrapped probably won’t reach the heights it has in previous years.