Tech
Was your 2024 Spotify Wrapped disappointing? A former engineer explains why it felt like a flop this year
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
2024-12-10T23:12:26Z
Spotify Wrapped logo
For the first time this year, Spotify Wrapped used Google's AI to make a podcast about users' favorite songs. Spotify; Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
Some Spotify users this year lambasted the music streaming app's popular year-end round-up, Wrapped.
A former Spotify engineer described what was different about Wrapped this year.
Despite the negative reception, this year's Wrapped was the biggest the company has seen.
When Spotify dropped its viral year-end musical round-up Wrapped earlier this month, the disappointment online was palpable.
"I'm not usually one to complain but this was one of the most boring Spotify Wrapped recaps I've been a part of and I've been a member since 2017," Business Insider reported a Reddit user said.
"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," a user on X wrote.
Spotify superfan Sydney Brown told The New York Times her annual Wrapped release is "like my Super Bowl," but this year, she felt like her round-up was "a homework project that was turned in late."
While the company said a record number of users checked out their Wrapped this year, an engineer who once worked on the feature said he understands why many online were disappointed.
Glenn McDonald is a former Spotify software engineer who worked on projects including Wrapped for over a decade before being caught in one of several rounds of sweeping layoffs that saw a 25% staff reduction.
This year, Wrapped "didn't give me any context," McDonald told Business Insider.
"It didn't connect me to communities or the world, or put my listening in relationship to anything," he said. "So, for me, it misses the important potential of a streaming service where everybody is listening together and just treats it as if each individual listener is listening by themselves."
The Wrapped 2024 round-up skipped the genre stories and cultural comparisons found in previous editions, instead creating an AI "podcast" of computer-generated voices talking through users' listening stats and briefly describing what emotional "era" their listening habits might suggest.
While some users called it a flop, a Spotify spokesperson told Business Insider it was the biggest year yet for the music streaming app's year-end round-up.
"In the first 12 hours this year's Wrapped was the biggest we've seen, up over 26% compared to day one in 2023," the Spotify spokesperson told BI. And while the company tracks user reactions on social media — both negative and positive — internal engagement statistics showed a record number of individual shares "and the biggest volume we've ever seen across the entire experience."
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A missed bet on the cutting-edge
Spotify wanted to embrace the cutting-edge features that AI has made possible, the spokesperson said. Still, it did not intend to diminish the humanistic elements of the Wrapped experience that users love.
In prior years, McDonald was on the team that brought Spotify users Wrapped features, including a Myers-Briggs-style description of the way users listen to music, comparisons of their music tastes to cities around the world, and genre stories that revealed the top types of music users were listening to.
He said those cultural elements weren't a priority this year, and the company leaned too much into "AI that doesn't really add anything to your life."
McDonald, a proponent of artificial intelligence who now works for an AI startup, said Spotify has always treated Wrapped primarily as a marketing exercise meant to go viral as users share their results. While he was at the company, he had to push for more community-focused features, he told BI.
"It's sort of hard to try to infuse humanity into a marketing exercise. It's not easy, and you're not always thanked for it," McDonald said.
He pointed to last year's layoffs as one reason remaining engineers may not have felt motivated to go the extra distance this year: "It doesn't surprise me that maybe anybody the following year looking at what happened last year goes, 'maybe I won't stick my neck out,'" he said.
While Spotify hasn't decided what future editions of Wrapped may include, the spokesperson said its features change each year to give users more of what they want.