After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify customers are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalised year-in-review characteristic, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going as far as to name it “boring” or a “flop.”
Chief among the many complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the opposite, intelligent and artistic information tales that it usually presents — like those who identify your music personality, match you to a town that shares your musical tastes, describe your “audio aura,” or turn your listening history into a game you can share with friends, amongst different issues. Others are upset over the shortage of extra detailed stats and the exclusion of data they’ve come to anticipate, like high music genres and high podcasts. Spotify declined to make clear how they determined which options to incorporate.
On X, a lot of persons are sharing their suggestions alongside the #SpotifyWrapped2024 hashtag, the place they’re describing this 12 months’s annual assessment of their listening historical past as “boring,” a “flop,” “underwhelming,” a “disappointment,” and extra. Though this hasn’t stopped individuals from sharing screenshots of their Wrapped, a scroll by way of the hashtag at the moment surfaces extra complaints than accolades.
For instance, one top post calling Wrapped a flop has over 108K likes as of the time of writing.
This 12 months, Spotify closely wager on a partnership with Google to show customers’ Wrapped experiences into an AI-powered podcast over the opposite particulars and options which have usually made Wrapped so partaking. One Spotify consumer particularly pointed to the shortage of “quirky interactive bits” just like the “foolish character assessments,” whereas one other noted the brand new “Your Music Evolution” characteristic was “fairly unusual.” (The latter had repurposed the area of interest genres Spotify makes use of for its personalized daily playlist, Daylist, as a method to describe how customers’ musical tastes modified all year long.)
What Spotify customers wished was the identical type of High Style data they’d in earlier years, the complaints point out.
Others discovered that Wrapped didn’t embody their High Podcasts in 2024, however this characteristic seems to have been supplied to some podcast listeners, and never others, posts on X point out.
Spotify says customers should have no less than two high exhibits to ensure that High Podcasts to be part of their Wrapped expertise. A present is eligible if the consumer listened for no less than 60 seconds of two distinctive episodes and listened to the present on two totally different days all year long.
Others mentioned that they couldn’t discover their Wrapped 2024 playlist. It does seem within the Wrapped feed within the Spotify app as “Your High Songs 2024,” however your Wrapped interactive expertise itself doesn’t hyperlink to the playlist, which can be why some people have missed it.
The graphics and artwork design used for Wrapped this 12 months additionally noticed combined critiques, as some described them as “mid,” “really simple,” and much worse, although others expressed liking them.
The AI podcast additionally had a combined reception. Those that hadn’t come throughout Google’s NotebookLM earlier than have been impressed by the expertise, although some expressed a feeling of unease with the characteristic. Spotify possible hoped customers would share their AI podcasts on social video apps like TikTok however, as an alternative, a perusal of the #SpotifyWrapped hashtag on the app exhibits many complaints in regards to the characteristic didn’t dwell as much as the hype this 12 months, with some suggesting AI was guilty.
As well as, a lot of customers related their disappointment with Wrapped to Spotify’s earlier layoffs, guessing that this 12 months’s downgrade needed to do with the shortage of staffing mixed with an overreliance on AI. The corporate let go of 2,300 people in 2023 which CEO Daniel Ek said had impacted day-to-day operations greater than anticipated.
Though a year-end characteristic, Wrapped is part of Spotify’s day-to-day operations to some extent, as the corporate informed press earlier this week it has already begun work on subsequent 12 months’s Wrapped. Groups from throughout the corporate contribute to the trouble, together with advertising and marketing, product, music, podcasts, audiobooks, and extra. Spotify declined to say how many individuals work on Wrapped, nevertheless.
When requested for touch upon the way it determined what to incorporate in Wrapped this 12 months, Spotify merely mentioned, “Yearly we glance to carry a brand new and thrilling expertise to Wrapped for listeners. It’s a part of the key sauce of Wrapped.”
