For Sydney Brown, the annual release of Spotify Wrapped, the personalized rundown of her music streaming habits, has always been a momentous occasion.
“All of my friends say it is like my Super Bowl,” said Ms. Brown, 23, who lives in Manhattan. But when she logged on to the streaming platform on Wednesday to see how Spotify would define her musical tastes this year, she found that instead of flashy new features like the Sound Towns of 2023, the offerings were lackluster and felt impersonal.
Her Spotify Wrapped, she said, “felt like a homework project that was turned in late.”
Ms. Brown is part of a vocal cohort of Spotify’s 640 million users who typically share their Wrapped results proudly, but this year she and many others found that new features generated by artificial intelligence — such as a podcast about their listening habits and word-salad-like summaries of their favorite genres — fell flat. On Reddit, TikTok and Twitter, users posted about their disappointment.
A delayed Wrapped built anticipation with little payoff.
Spotify Wrapped was released a few days later in 2024 than in previous years, leading many users to believe that exciting new features were in store.
Posts and videos on social media described users on the edge of their seats. “I try to be the chill girl but WHERE IS SPOTIFY WRAPPED,” one user said on X.
“The hype was so loud,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the youth trends newsletter “After School,” in which she recently included a TikTok with the caption: “The wait for Spotify has driven me to insanity.”
But the wait did not pay off. When Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, even the most avid lovers of Spotify, like Ms. Brown, were left disappointed.
In previous years, “there has been a little more effort put into the Spotify Wrapped,” Ms. Brown said in an interview.
While users were still shown the standard data about their top songs and artists of the year, as well as the number of minutes they listened, Ms. Brown said that some of the niche insights offered in previous years had been done away with.
She also questioned the accuracy of users’ top songs lists.
Some other social media users lamented the loss of information such as a user’s top genre for the year, as well as the Sound Towns that sought to geolocate a user’s music tastes (Noah Kahan fans, for example, often got Burlington, Vt.).
In long Reddit threads, users complained that the presentation was unimaginative. One Reddit user commented that Spotify had taken an extra week “to do less than they ever have.”
Users’ ‘musical evolutions’ were a word salad.
A new feature of Spotify Wrapped this year is Your Musical Evolution, which aims to reveal up to three musical phases that Spotify says “uniquely defined your year.”
Users received phases with largely confounding names, including “Pink Pilates Princess Roller Skating Pop,” “After Hours Football Rap” and “Cinnamon Softcore Art Deco,” paired with the artists whose music had inspired those terms.
The feature was widely mocked on social media, with one Reddit user commenting that the titles were “random words tossed together.”
Ms. Lewis said that she believed Spotify was trying to create a “meme-able” moment, as it had done with the release of Sound Towns. But instead, many users grumbled that the genres “made no sense,” feeding into a sense that no effort had been made to give the content a human touch.
“You can understand why Gen Z was like, This is lame,” Ms. Lewis said.
The new A.I. podcast left Spotify fans divided.
Another new feature is an A.I. podcast customized for each user, helmed by what Spotify calls “two dynamic hosts using generative A.I.” to talk through the user’s musical preferences. (One editor’s podcast includes the insight: “I can just picture those cozy evenings with Springsteen on the record player.”)
Some found it creative. Cassie Stewart, 21, of Prince Edward Island, who often posts on Booktok, said in an interview that the feature “broke the fourth wall,” adding that it was “so fun to listen to because it felt so personal.”
But other social media users criticized the reliance on A.I. technology, with one Reddit user commenting that it sounded “like the most soulless talk show radio hosts just reusing artist names over and over.”
Ms. Lewis said that some of the disappointment came from the feeling that this year’s Spotify Wrapped was “corporate” and “electronic.”
“I don’t think there is going to be any love lost with Spotify,” Ms. Lewis said. But she added that the platform “should rethink their strategy next year and, as much as they can, make it a little bit more curated or a little more thoughtful.”
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