Spotify Wrapped this year has been a controversial topic, with some students thinking it was spot on, and others left quite confused by the songs added and the peculiar names used to describe their “personal genres,” with rumors of it being generated by AI. Considering the long wait to come out this year, everyone was expecting something much better and more thought out.
Spotify Wrapped is a yearly tradition that was started in December 2016. It was originally developed from its initial campaign called “Year In Music”, it was similar to Wrapped but much less developed. Spotify Wrapped tracks your listening from January 1st to October 31st and all prior Wraps are stored in Spotify’s database and can be found on a desktop.
Many are dwelling on the old Wrapped, missing the unique and fun style it contained, calling the new one bland, lazy, and a big downgrade from the prior years.
An 8th-grade student at Lively, Minh Dao, is a victim of this year’s lousy Spotify Wrapped. “I don’t really like how it was designed this year and I miss the past Spotify Wrapped,” said Dao. The genre Spotify gave Dao named ‘mall goth punk skateboarder’ was “quite humorous” to her.
Again, many have speculated that AI was used to create the designs and genre names, but is this true? One of Spotify’s spokesmen said that, while yes Spotify had used AI, it was not used for Wrapped data results or the creative designs, and that each user’s Wrapped was developed based on their listening history and consumption this year. Although, one of the new features in the Wrapped is an AI podcast, which is technically just your Wrapped but more in-depth and in podcast form. It’s ‘hosted’ by the NotebookLM showing two AI voices sharing your musical progress through the year.
If you’re looking to find your Spotify Wrapped and let yourself decide whether it’s as big of a disappointment as everyone says, you can get there through Spotify’s app, look through the genres above your playlists’ and scroll until you find ‘Wrapped’. This will be available on your home page until the next Wrapped.
If you don’t use Spotify or are just that disappointed in it, you can also find your Apple Music Replay. Apple Music Replay started on November 25th, 2019. Apple Music generates a playlist each year beginning a few weeks after January 1st. It is then automatically updated every week until the year ends.
Emmalin Whitley, an 8th-grade student, uses both Apple Music and Spotify. She has Spotify but chooses to use Apple because she subscribes to Apple Music, although she keeps Spotify for when she wants to listen to podcasts. She finds her replay accurate and says she hadn’t realized how broad her music taste is.
According to the Apple support website, to access your Replay, you need to update your iPhone or iPad to iOS/iPad OS 18.1 or later or update your Android to the latest OS. To find your Replay, go to the Home tab on Apple Music, scroll down to ‘Replay: Your Top Songs by Year,’ and then press ‘Listen Back’ to access your listening stats, or go here.
I think it’s safe to say that we’re all hoping for a better outcome next Wrapped with more creative and accurate results, Spotify has to do its best to make up for this year’s Wrapped disaster.
