Happy Thursday!

Spotify Wrapped dropped yesterday and Tate McRae was suspiciously high in my listening habits considering all the things I said about her this year. I will always give Miss McRae this: She has bangers. However, I don’t think I actually listened to “Sports car” 53 times like Spotify said. Anyways, further thoughts on this year’s Wrapped below. 

Also in this newsletter: TikTok Shop IRL, YouTube’s first Wrapped-like experience, iHeartRadio’s anti-AI stance, and more.

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At the Spotify Wrapped press preview on Dec. 2, one got the sense that the streaming service had a lot to prove. 

Last year’s experience, despite high engagement, was admittedly lackluster for users, something that its developers acknowledged several times throughout the briefing. It was the first time Spotify’s crown slipped in this arena. With competitors developing their own versions of Wrapped and the feature reaching its 10th anniversary this year, it was clear that the team felt the pressure to step their game up. 

And boy, did they step up. This year’s Wrapped introduced the following features: Listening Age, which calculated your age based on your listening habits; Top Albums, which fans have asked for; Fan Leaderboard, which showed a select number of fans where exactly they ranked as top listeners; Clubs, which are kind of like the tarot cards and “vibe” features from previous years that tell you what kind of music lover you are — akin to a personality test; Archives, the only AI-powered feature that pulled specific data points throughout the year; and Wrapped Party, which allows groups of up to 10 friends to compare listening habits. I almost feel like they set the bar too high for themselves, but the experience was undoubtedly better this year. Judging by the reaction online, many people agreed. 

When asked by someone at Spotify which feature I thought would blow up the most, I said Listening Ages. They’re sticky and immediately understandable like the Sound Towns they did a few years ago. Fan leaderboards were also destined to be a hit with Stan Twitter, which latched onto the rankings with glee.  

Spotify also seemed adamant on dispelling any AI rumors in Wrapped. When asked about AI usage in last year’s feature during the Q&A section, one Spotify executive said: “It absolutely was not the case last year or this year that the experience was created entirely using AI. 2025 we have one of our experiences [Archives], which leverages an LLM to add a storytelling layer to the facts and figures that we hope will help really bring it to life.”

Throughout the Wrapped presentation, Spotify emphasized the human creativity behind the Wrapped campaign. Global brand director Payman Kassaie shared that the design was inspired by analog mixtape culture, with assets featuring a lot of imperfect lines. (I recommend this Death to Stock 2026 trend prediction about naive design for more about the use of this style in the age of AI slop.) Principal product manager Jacob Masga also dropped the names of the artists that created the illustrations for the Clubs features and the background music behind the Wrapped summary landing page. As we’ve been seeing a lot lately, human creativity has been used as a marketing tool amid ongoing anti-AI backlash. 

That being said, the one AI-powered feature, Archives, which pulls specific listening data from key days of the year, has some of the most nonsensical copy I’ve ever read. It also mixed up some songs and artists, which made me wonder if that’s why my Wrapped stats feel a bit off (this year and in years past). For example, I had a report on my “Biggest Charli XCX listening day,” which included tracks like “Club classics” (correct) and “Drums of Death” (wrong, this is an FKA Twigs song). 

Of course, we can’t talk about Wrapped without also discussing the criticism that Spotify has gotten this year. Thousands of artists have taken their music off of Spotify after CEO Daniel Ek invested hundreds of millions into German defense company Helsing, which is developing AI tech for militaries. This move also came amid ongoing battles for better pay for musicians hosted on the platform. There have been many calls to boycott the streaming service and switch to alternatives (options I have been considering myself in recent months). 

Wrapped is one of the biggest motivators for many users to keep Spotify, serving as one of the last pieces of goodwill the service has. Is it enough to keep users on the platform? A preliminary scan of social media suggests yes, especially since its packaging of listening data is unmatched. I’ll be curious to see how Wrapped continues to evolve, considering how ambitious this year’s experience was. I’ll leave you with my own personal Wrapped (with commentary I put on my Instagram Story yesterday). 

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