Love it or hate it, Spotify Wrapped season is here.
It’s been just a few hours since the music streaming giant’s annual end-of-year social media campaign launched, and it’s already generating a tonne of chatter, memes and, of course, criticism.
At its core, Wrapped is a simple, brilliant marketing concept: at the end of each year, Spotify subscribers are treated to a colourful, visually striking overview of their listening habits and most-streamed songs, artists and podcasts, and it encourages users to share their results on social media.
Since launching in 2016 — from an idea originally created by an intern who claims she never received credit (Spotify denies this) — the campaign has evolved into a sometimes gamified signifier of one’s taste (or lack thereof) and a snapshot of mainstream listening trends.
And yet, each year, in an effort to drum up interest and stay fresh, Wrapped introduces new and increasingly bizarre algorithmic features to describe listening patterns. For example, in 2021, Wrapped provided each user with an “audio aura,” in the form of a colour palette and random adjectives that ostensibly captured your “music mood.”
What’s new with Spotify Wrapped 2024
Credit where it’s due: this year’s Wrapped is, visually, better than ever. But the new features are also more obnoxious than they’ve ever been. Among the new ones is “Your 2024 Music Evolution,” which draws from your monthly listening habits to come up with a mostly nonsensical description of what “phase” you were in at the time. According to my Wrapped, I was listening to a lot of Tyla, Burna Boy and Fireboy DML in February, which an algorithm determined was my “Pink Pilates Princess Hollywood Afrobeats phase.” By March, I was listening to more music by Erika de Casier, Charlotte Day Wilson and Tinashe, aka “Frutiger Aero Strut Alternative R&B season.”
This year’s Wrapped also includes a feature that lets you share an AI-generated podcast summarizing your listening habits, which might sound cool if you’re into that kind of thing, though to me it’s about as interesting as sticking my head into a beehive.
The use of artificial intelligence is already facing criticism on social media, where many are noting that Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek laid off about 17 per cent of the company’s staff last December.
“Every year, Spotify Wrapped becomes something that feels actively hostile to the enjoyment of music, now with more blatant data mining to train AI which is bad enough, but also remember that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is a primary investor in an AI predator drone company,” wrote culture critic Niko Stratis on Bluesky.
Still, I was pleased, as I always am, to see my top artists and songs listed in a neat, shareable listicle, which I plan to discuss with my coworkers at lunch. My Wrapped also concluded with a short, low-quality video clip of Charli XCX thanking me for my support in 2024, which left me feeling nothing at all.
“This year’s features seem to actively lump us into bigger pockets of monoculture compared to previous years, which really focused on the sub-genres we were into and humouring the more eclectic aspects of our listening habits,” music writer Emilie Hanskamp told me.
“Personally, I was bummed by that,” she added. “I guess it’s hard with the ‘Brat’ and Chappell Roan year that we had, but they leaned into that too much at the expense of picking apart the nuances of our listening habits, which I personally am more interested in.”
What did Canadians listen to in 2024?
One of my major criticisms of Wrapped is that while it ostensibly provides a way for people to showcase their unique tastes and interests (since it relies on a single metric: number of streams), the campaign often ends up reflecting the monoculture. Rather than promoting new or emerging artists, Wrapped becomes a celebration of the world’s biggest and most commercially successful ones. This is particularly problematic given that Spotify pays extremely meagre royalty rates — literally fractions of a penny per stream — which makes it an negligible source of income for nonmajor artists.
Anyway, it will come as no surprise that the most streamed artist in Canada this year was Taylor Swift, whose album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology” was the country’s most listened-to album. (Swift was also the most streamed artist globally for the second year in a row, with more than 26.6 billion streams.)
Following Swift, the most streamed artists in Canada were Drake, Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen and Travis Scott, while the most streamed albums were Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” and Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”
The country’s most streamed songs were Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help,” Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Kahan’s “Stick Season.”
As for podcasts, Canadians apparently couldn’t get enough of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “Call Her Daddy,” “Huberman Lab,” “This Past Weekend w/Theo Von” and “The Mel Robbins Podcast.”
The country’s top audiobook was “The Fellowship of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien, which makes me quite happy.
And for what it’s worth, the only mention of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — a Drake diss track whose numbers the Toronto rapper accused Universal Music Group and Spotify of artificially inflating — was not among the top 10 most streamed songs globally.
