Was your 2024 Spotify Wrapped disappointing? A former engineer explains why it felt like a flop this year

This year, for the first time, Spotify Wrapped used Google’s AI to make a podcast about users’ favorite songs.

When Spotify dropped its viral year-end musical roundup, Wrapped, earlier this month, the disappointment online was palpable.

“I’m not usually one to complain but this was one of the most boring Spotify Wrapped recaps I’ve been a part of and I’ve been a member since 2017,” one Reddit user said.

“Spotify wrapped flopped this year so bad like where are the music cities, the playlists, the top genres or the listening auras… all that wait for WHAT,” a user on X wrote.

Sydney Brown, a Spotify superfan, told The New York Times her annual Wrapped release was “like my Super Bowl,” but this year, her roundup felt like “a homework project that was turned in late.”

While the company said a record number of users checked out their Wrapped this year, an engineer who once worked on the feature said he understood why many online were disappointed.

Glenn McDonald is a former Spotify software engineer who worked on projects including Wrapped for more than a decade before being caught in one of several rounds of sweeping layoffs that saw a 25% staff reduction.

This year, Wrapped “didn’t give me any context,” McDonald told B-17.

“It didn’t connect me to communities or the world or put my listening in relationship to anything,” he said. “So, for me, it misses the important potential of a streaming service where everybody is listening together and just treats it as if each individual listener is listening by themselves.”

The Wrapped 2024 roundup skipped the genre stories and cultural comparisons found in previous editions, instead creating an AI “podcast” of computer-generated voices talking through users’ listening stats and briefly describing what emotional “era” their listening habits might suggest.

While some users called it a flop, a Spotify spokesperson told B-17 it was the biggest year yet for the music streaming app’s year-end roundup.

“In the first 12 hours this year’s Wrapped was the biggest we’ve seen, up over 26% compared to day one in 2023,” the Spotify spokesperson said. And while the company tracks user reactions on social media — both negative and positive — internal engagement statistics showed a record number of individual shares “and the biggest volume we’ve ever seen across the entire experience,” the spokesperson added.

A missed bet on the cutting-edge

Spotify wanted to embrace the cutting-edge features that AI has made possible, the spokesperson said. Still, it seemed to diminish the humanistic elements of the Wrapped experience that users love.

In prior years, McDonald was on the team that brought Spotify users Wrapped features, including a Myers-Briggs-style description of the way users listened to music, comparisons of their music tastes with those of people in different cities around the world, and genre stories that showed the top types of music users were listening to.

He said those cultural elements weren’t a priority this year, and the company leaned too much into “AI that doesn’t really add anything to your life.”

McDonald, a proponent of artificial intelligence who now works for an AI startup, said Spotify had always treated Wrapped primarily as a marketing exercise meant to go viral as users share their results. While he was at the company, he had to push for more community-focused features, he said.

“It’s sort of hard to try to infuse humanity into a marketing exercise. It’s not easy, and you’re not always thanked for it,” McDonald said.

He pointed to last year’s layoffs as one reason remaining engineers might not have felt motivated to go the extra mile this year: “It doesn’t surprise me that maybe anybody the following year looking at what happened last year goes, ‘Maybe I won’t stick my neck out,'” he said.

The Spotify spokesperson said that while Spotify hadn’t decided what future editions of Wrapped might include, its features would change each year to give users more of what they want.