Spotify reeled in record-high user engagement in 2024 as it celebrated its 10^th annual Wrapped campaign. At this point, it’s hard not to consider it a yearly tradition, a holiday even, for millions of users. However, users were overwhelmingly disappointed by Wrapped 2024, suggesting that record-high user engagement doesn’t necessarily mean record-high user satisfaction.

If you use Spotify and have seen your Wrapped from prior years, you may have felt this year’s to be lackluster, as well. Spotify revealed only two new music-related insights in this year’s Wrapped, one of which only had a single unmemorable page attached to it that you likely glossed over (this was the “Longest Listening Streak”). The second was “Your Music Evolution,” which assigned a hyper-specific string of words based on the user’s listening habits – like “pink pilates princess strut pop” or “smooth old school soul yacht rock” – to describe the different unique genres that dominated throughout the user’s year. To inform these musical phases, Spotify relied on machine learning to assemble thousands of descriptors identified by a team of data scientists and music experts. These descriptors, which were based on genre, mood, and other themes, were then linked to specific songs through methods like automated song annotations, content-based filtering, and listening trend analyses. The Wrapped team’s goal was to evoke memories, stories, and reflections throughout your year by revealing your musical phases. Besides this being almost the same feature as Spotify’s Daylist, and therefore not that refreshing of an insight, the phrases were so specific that they became nonsensical – it’s hard for a user to explain what “Vampire football rap” is when it doesn’t exist.

Several media companies quickly wrote about users’ frustrations with Wrapped 2024 and recalled some of the insights from previous years. Wrapped 2023, for example, told users their “Sound Town” based on shared listening habits with the people in that city. A lot of people were fond of this insight for several reasons, one being that they were able to share a descriptor with millions of other users. As a user, you not only related to a real place that shared your music taste, but you could partake in co-creating and sharing some collective cultural meaning of this descriptor with others.

Further, Wrapped 2024 had just 10 pages of insights compared to the previous year’s 20 pages. This drastic reduction in pages not only diminished the quality of the insights but the entire UI and interaction design. The 2021 “Audio Aura” feature provided a digital photo of the user’s listening habits and preferences, giving the user a visual embodiment of their invisible music taste. The next year, Spotify designed colorful geometric icons to represent 16 different "Listening Personalities” (inspired by the Meyers-Briggs personality test), assigning the user a distinct emblem for their musical brand. Even for the quicker insights that only had one slide, the Wrapped team still created clever graphics that differed from the other insights’ designs yet still fell in line with the overall brand design that year. The motion design in 2022 was also particularly captivating and commanded the user’s attention as they scrolled.

With all the reasons Wrapped 2024 missed the mark, they all lead back to Spotify's misunderstanding of Wrapped’s charm and the reason why we all flock to the Spotify app every year upon its launch: the gift of being told a story about yourself you haven’t heard before, and the ability to share and relate to each other’s.

Wrapped has always attempted to illustrate your listening story, but Wrapped 2024 told an uneventful biography while previous years told a semi-fictitious adventure – users want the latter. The previous year, in addition to Sound Town, Spotify also released the “Me in 2023” feature which assigned users one of 12 listening identities based on their streaming habits (such as “Hypnotist” for someone who liked to play albums all the way through or “Time Traveler” for someone who repeated a lot of the same songs that year). By the end, the user heard a story in which they were an Alchemist who created tons of playlists and belonged in Burlington, Vermont at heart. They had the opportunity to reflect on their year in the lens of their listening personality and recall when and why they made particular playlists, who they shared them with or made them for, which ones to revisit, and so on. They may have also tried to learn more about their Sound Town after learning about its music taste and form an idea of themselves in relation to the city.

This storytelling is semi-fictitious, rooted in real data but using cultural comparisons to colorfully narrate the person’s year. It’s partly fiction not in that the insights are fake, but these insights, like a user being an “Alchemist,” are essentially imaginative qualities, communities, or brands to which users can attribute themselves. They can call themselves an Alchemist and not just somebody who makes a lot of playlists, taking themselves out of their existing world and into another.

Even more, users are not just learning about their “moods” or “habits” but a piece of their identity. Spotify’s data scientists actually explored the connection between the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability) and user listening habits, and they found that musical preferences could predict personality traits with moderate to high accuracy. The researchers point out clear limitations in this study, including the sample size being a small group of U.S. Spotify users and the possibility of other personality constructs like cognitive profiles or narrative identities, but there still exists some connection between personality and music that is unique to every person. Wrapped can be about who you are, not just what you’ve listened to.

Wrapped 2024 left little to no room for interpretation in your listening story. The Music Evolution feature strung together AI-generated descriptors of users’ listening habits throughout the year that felt like one long Mad Lib, ultimately making it confusing and difficult to associate oneself with anything at all. This is where Spotify’s misunderstanding lies – you don’t feel understood being told word-for-word what you already know about yourself. You feel understood when you resonate with something that represents some part of your identity or experiences, something that you haven’t seen, read, heard, or can even touch but still feel belongs. A common example of this is when a lyric says exactly what you were feeling but didn’t have the words for. You might feel even more understood if the song is performed in a particular way or by a particular artist; I find this to be true with covers or live versions (“Morning Jesus” live at Denver Ball Arena with Florence+ the Machine and Ethel Cain, for your consideration). Sometimes, you don’t even know why you resonate with a lyric or melody, you just do. That’s the beauty in feeling understood – you don’t need to explicitly define what you’ve been experiencing or feeling, something else actualizes it for you.

Previous Wrapped features achieved this by giving users a new identifier for their music preferences that are abstract enough to be interpreted for themselves but still hold a broader meaning that can be shared and understood by others. This brings me to another key driver of Wrapped’s success – people want to share and relate to each other’s stories. To use the Sound Town example, Spotify picked wildly different cities to assign people – you most likely do not live in your Sound Town or know much about it. The only factors that people based their understanding of their Sound Town were the artists that were popular there that year and maybe a quick Google search of the city, if they went an extra step. This led people to formulate the personalities, interests, and other traits about the city based on stereotypes and assumptions about the artists and their fanbases (the LGBTQ+-focused site Them captured some of the discourse perfectly with their article, “Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You in Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay.”). Spotify didn’t tell users “You like this type of music” but “You share the music taste of the people in this city,” shifting the notion of music identity from personal to communal. Balancing user individuality and user connectedness in the entire Wrapped story, Spotify tapped into our desire for social validation and turned individual listening habits into a collective experience.

From a user engagement perspective, this is an effective way to get users to talk about a feature. People will compare their Sound Towns or unpack their listening personalities with each other; they will flood to social media or their group chats to share and compare their Wrapped results and continue conversations days later. The joy of Wrapped is being able to comment, bond, disagree, and joke with other people about each other’s results and what they say about each other. Spotify was able to achieve this with unique music identities and shared stories, enabling users to construct meaning both individually and as a collective

It's apparent that those cultural elements weren’t a priority for 2024 Wrapped. One of Spotify’s goals is to make the entire experience on the app as personalized as possible, but perhaps this is goal has been over-emphasized and misdirected. Humans do love personalized data, but this is just a fraction of the entire experience engaging with music. Receiving a hyper-specific description of your music taste is a lonely experience – music is famously a collective experience, and Wrapped 2024 suggests music is about your pleasure only and not something meant to be engaged with, sought out, or even criticized.

Spotify has noted that their editorial experts’ work is “grounded in a deep understanding of music culture” to help define the year in music, which was absolutely apparent in previous years' Wrappeds since their work was visibly at the forefront of the experience. Take the Meyers-Briggs Listening Personalities as an example – editorial experts and data scientists analyzed and identified common listening trends that year (i.e., listening to popular artists versus lesser-known ones) and then materialized these trends into specific metrics representing them (i.e., Commonality versus Uniqueness). Ultimately contriving new music personas such as the “Specialist” or the “Voyage,” the Wrapped team capitalized on the satisfaction gained from personality tests by creating their own.

The human element in the very creation of Wrapped is not to be overlooked. In previous years, it was apparent that people – music listeners and lovers – were the ones creating the categories and building the insights and designs around them to reflect people’s musical identities, which would then be reinforced and continuously molded through cultural exchanges. It’s more meaningful to know a team of people put this story together for you as opposed to an algorithm that spit out surface-level descriptions.