As far as holiday traditions go, it may not reach as far back as yule logs and wassail, but over the past decade, Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform’s annual summation of users’ listening habits, has cemented its position as a digital cultural custom.
Some users spend all year anticipating their results, thinking of it as their Super Bowl. Others try to game their outcomes to favor a particular artist or album. In 2023, users were baffled by the way Spotify sorted them into geographic regions by music taste. (Were you a Burlington, Vt., or more of a Berkeley, Calif.?) Last year, some users were disappointed by the platform’s A.I.-heavy offering.
This year, Wrapped, which was released on Wednesday, includes a new feature that shows the top listeners of certain artists how their listening time ranks against other superfans.
The end-of-year review space is getting crowded, though. Seemingly everything is getting wrapped up these days.
From the books you read to to the takeout you ordered, the gimmick of packaging user data into cutesy graphics ripe for sharing has become ubiquitous, thanks largely to Spotify. Wrapped has become like Kleenex, a now-generic word that has come to stand for a broad category of product.
In recent years, Duolingo has told users how much time they spent learning languages; food-related platforms like Resy, Seamless and even McDonald’s have detailed dining habits; and Steam, the gaming platform, told users how much time they spent playing video games, how many achievements they unlocked and other “fun numbers.” Strava, the fitness app, added together user workouts; and Partiful, the event invitation service, let partygoers know how many events they attended.
Spotify, for its part, is not worrying much about competition, Payman Kassaie, the service’s global brand director, said in an interview. He noted a feature that tells users their so-called listening age based on their musical interests. This year, there is also an animated feature that shows a user’s top artists sprinting across the screen, racing for the No. 1 spot.
Charmingly creative or not, as more platforms roll out data-backed retrospectives, users are starting to notice all that information adding up. We have fitness watches and rings that allow us to track our every move. Do we need the metrics for our social lives, too?
“I feel like it’s been a three-year period now where it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t need my dentist emailing me about my year in review,’” Anna Cincera, a copywriter who lives in Portland, Ore., joked.
End-of-year roundups no longer “hit like they used to,” Ms. Cincera, 35, said. As users have become more aware of the marketing mechanics at play, she added, “the regurgitation of the data that they store on you has lost its shine.”
She still looks forward, though, to her annual data from Goodreads, whose “year in books” has typically told readers how many books they read and tallied how many pages they turned.
These features are partly a result of the large volume of personal data people generate every day, said Jeremy Morris, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We don’t have the time to parse through all the things, so now we have systems that are sort of playing on that nostalgia,” he said.
For some, the barrage of information about themselves can be anxiety inducing.
“I feel like the data turns my private habits into a public scoreboard,” said Elle Bulado, 32, a freelance content producer who lives in Manhattan. Sometimes she feels “boxed in” by the algorithms that fuel many of these platforms, she added.
While these yearly digital debriefs can serve as a mirror of users’ tastes — in music, food and events — some are starting to question whether that taste is truly their own, all too aware of the algorithms that can shape their choices.
Caitlin Begg, the founder of Authentic Social, an applied research lab focused on sociology and technology, described a phenomenon she calls the “algorithmization of everyday life,” explaining that “these patterns and repetitive behaviors can be more indicative of convenience than they are of determined choice.”
Did you, say, listen to that indie band this year because you loved its sound, or because its song automatically started playing after a Taylor Swift album?
Speaking from a landline, Ms. Begg, 31, explained she makes it a point to intentionally seek out analog experiences to avoid the “prediction algorithm.”
There are still plenty of people, though, who look forward to their personalized years in review. The information exists, holding the potential for self-knowledge. How could they not check it out?
Scott Knoblock, who lives in Pensacola, Fla., said he spent 2025 trying to top his Spotify records from the previous year, when he listened to music on the service for 345,106 minutes.
For Mr. Knoblock, 48, who works in water utilities, Spotify Wrapped data sometimes is not granular enough. He uses a third-party platform called Stats.fm to keep track of additional data and create a sort of wrapped for his annual Wrapped, he said.
“You will not find me without a earbud in the ear,” he said. “That’s me. That’s the center of my world.”
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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