Music fans online have come around to engage in their favourite yearly tradition: bashing Spotify Wrapped.
While every year, Wrapped will be hotly anticipated and then roundly criticised, this year’s was different, with several calling it the ‘worst Spotify Wrapped ever’.
Compared to 2023, this year was a much more stripped back affair.
Gone were weirdly specific places associated with your music, gone were genre breakdowns, and a full day on, many have still yet to receive a playlist of their top songs of 2024.
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Fans were incensed, with one tweeting: “spotify making us wait all that time and wrapped has the most boring visuals and slideshow in years”.
Another said: “That was the most 'here damn' Spotify Wrapped yet. They didn't even give us our top genres???"
A third hilariously put: “Spotify wrapped is SO LAZY this year they didn’t tell me whether that gay little town in Vermont still matches my music taste”.
As a queer person who also got Burlington, Vermont on Spotify wrapped last year, I am incensed.
A fourth 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.”
One post compared the lengths of Wrapped from last year to this year’s edition, noting how much shorter it is.
Last year’s far more detailed Wrapped was 20 slides long, a far cry from this year’s nine-slide affair.
Other fans pointed to issues with the algorithm, with one posting her wrapped saying: “I learned 2 things from this year’s Spotify Wrapped: 1. I should probably cancel my Spotify premium 2. Their EOY metrics are 100% made-up.”
This refers to the metric for what % listener you are for your favourites, with her account telling she listened to her top song, ‘Good Luck Babe’ by Chappell Roan, four times. It also claimed that she was in the top 1% of listeners of the song globally, which has over a billion listens.
Some fans, however think they’ve figured out what’s gone wrong this year.
One tweeted: “apparently Spotify laid off a lot of workers and used AI to create the wrapped this year instead no wonder it sucks…”
Whilst it is unclear is Spotify did use AI to create this year’s Wrapped outside of their AI Podcast, AI DJ, and AI playlists, the fact they have laid off workers in the last year is a fact.
Last December, the music streaming service laid off 1,500 workers, 17% of their staff, over the holiday period.
This led Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to say in a Q1 2024 earnings call: “Although there's no question that it was the right strategic decision, it did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated”.
The LADbible group have contacted Spotify for comment.
Topics: Spotify, Music, Social Media, Technology, Entertainment, Lifestyle
Michael Slavin