Why are people upset at this year’s Spotify Wrapped?
Every year, usually around the end of November or start of December, those who listen to music on Spotify get a “Spotify Wrapped.” This is a wrap-up of all the music you’ve listened to from January 1st to October 31st. It tells you how many minutes you’ve listened, your top songs, artists, and makes you your own playlist for your most listened to songs. Although, this year the hype quickly died down when users got theirs, and were quite disappointed and confused.
The buildup to one’s Spotify Wrapped is intense. The last week of November for some was spent meticulously researching when their wraps would come out. Spotify itself sent out a couple teasers, fully aware that millions of users were waiting outside their doorstep impatiently. A few have even coined it as their “psych analysis,” as music can be very defining and reflective. It’s also pretty fun to find out what has happened in your headphones for the past 10 months. So you can imagine that when Spotify’s Wrapped for all 626 million users went haywire, people went maniacal.
The most common complaint gotten about Spotify’s Wrapped was its inaccuracy. Freshman Malia Hodge said, “I don’t think my Spotify Wrapped was completely accurate. My top songs and artists were ones that I listened to months ago or ones that I only listened to very little times.” This is the same thing happening to others. Songs will appear on their most listened, but were unexpected due to them rarely being listened to or only in the early months of the year.
If you put two and two together, you’ll know that if a certain artist is in your top 5s, then there’s a high chance that many of their songs would be in your tops. But according to Tom’s Guide.com, some have even shown that they would have artists, for example Taylor Swift, in their top artists, but wouldn’t have any Taylor Swift songs in their top songs list. Taylor Swift or other popular artists that were mostly pop artists, would even show up in one’s top artists, but they exclusively only listen to hardcore punk rock.
The second complaint was Spotify’s taste of design. In past years, the theme usually had spectacular graphics, colors, and felt like a virtual world.
This year though, we’ve been presented with basic shapes and colors without theme, a major step down from before. Lovingly Garduno-Alvarez, a freshman, when asked if she liked the theme, said, “No, I thought it was kind of basic compared to last years and really repetitive like it used the same element instead of a theme.” Spotify is known for being a clean and good-looking app, but it just didn’t show. Unless, Spotify wasn’t the one responsible for it.
Spotify apparently has been using AI for the whole thing. This year, Spotify has been using AI to generate recommendations and playlists daily and also every other nook and cranny for a user. It even has an AI podcast. It’s been confirmed that the playlist of this year’s top songs for a user was completely AI. Which obviously had mistakes, and so did the rest of people’s Wrapped. With this, we can only assume that this year’s wrapped was in its entirety, AI.
There were also less-fun features, as years before had other fun categories like what kind of listener are you or gave a city that has the most people with your music taste. This year was just the basics. Freshman, Lovingly Garduno-Alvarez, explained her full opinion on her Spotify Wrapped. “Overhyped, it seemed like Spotify paid little to no attention for this despite it being one of their most popular publicity tactics and made us wait longer and gave really nothing new.”
Spotify, one of the biggest platforms out there, has let us down. Our pop culture “psychoanalysis” was more of an analysis gone wrong. Will next year be a repeat? Or will Spotify listen to the complaints? People deserve a well done “Wrapped” with the amount of music some people listen to. As they say, the customer is always right.
