It’s normal to be a little disappointed by your Spotify Wrapped, especially if you find out your top track is “White Noise For Sleep 10 Hours Loopable No Fade.” But this year, Spotify users were disappointed by their Wrapped for other reasons. On social media, many have complained about the yearly overview being “boring” and “underwhelming,” especially compared to previous years. But why was this year’s Wrapped so disappointing?

Last winter, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek laid off 17% of the company’s employees. This extreme cut may have been partially due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that began around this time. A common speculation circulating online as to why these layoffs may have occurred is that Ek wanted to try to save money by replacing human employees with AI models, even though Spotify reported financial success in the quarter just before these layoffs occurred. So, if you felt as though your Wrapped this year seemed more automated and less human than in previous years, that may be justified. 

One of the biggest disappointments of 2024’s Spotify Wrapped is the lack of an important statistic that had been present in Wrapped for years: users’ top genres. This wasn’t an oversight by the Wrapped developers. One of the people fired in Ek’s massive layoff spree was data scientist Glenn McDonald, the man behind the data platform EveryNoise, which sorts millions of tracks into thousands of genres that allow users to understand patterns in their favorite music. Now, McDonald no longer has access to the technology he needs to continue maintaining the platform. EveryNoise was never an official Spotify resource; however, some of its data was built into some Spotify features like Daily Mixes. And you may have already noticed, if you frequently use features like “daylist” and “Made For You”, these discovery features now tend to serve up mostly the same artists and genres day in and day out, a direct complication of McDonald’s inability to update EveryNoise since last December. 

A new Wrapped 2024 feature, “music evolution”, supposedly tried to replace the “top genres” stat by showing listeners how their music listening habits evolved through a few select months of the year. However, the genres that it sorted musicians into have been criticized heavily for being nonsensical, seemingly AI-generated, and useless (Pink Pilates Princess, anyone?). And, comparing these incredibly niche micro-genre titles found in the “music evolution” feature to the titles of Spotify’s pre-existing “daylist” feature, it’s almost impossible not to believe that the Wrapped feature used the same exact technology, recycled as though Spotify expected its users not to notice. 

Another popular criticism of Wrapped 2024 is the lack of an original new feature unique to this year. 2021 brought “Audio Aura”, an abstract, Polaroid-inspired combination of colors that represents a user’s music taste by assigning certain colors to specific moods. 2023 introduced “Sound Town”, matching a user’s music taste with a city anywhere in the world that seemed to share their music taste; for example, Noah Kahan and Lizzy McAlpine might have landed you in Burlington, VT, but SZA and NewJeans represented Berkeley, CA. However, 2024’s only new feature, besides the “music evolution” theoretically meant to replace top genres, was the “Spotify Wrapped AI Podcast”, created with Google’s NotebookLM AI model, which merely restates the same statistics that users already read, in two eerily flat AI voices reading from a coded script for five minutes, which many people on social media found to be either extremely boring or downright unsettling. 

So, while 2024 Wrapped technically did introduce two new unique features, it lacked creativity and didn’t tell users anything new. And, importantly, it didn’t give them anything to talk about with friends besides the basic, screenshot-able overview page at the very end. Last year, Spotify users took to social media to find community and joke about fellow residents of their “sound town”; this year, most of the talk online about Wrapped has been negative. 

Spotify Wrapped is more than a music review. It’s an opportunity for connection, for discussion, and for reflection. And in past years, it’s felt like a personalized gift from the Spotify team to its loyal users, thoughtful and creative. Wrapped 2024 felt sloppy, generic, and soulless, leaving many users wondering: Was there any human creativity behind this year’s Wrapped?

With many competitor music streaming apps, such as Apple Music, Pandora, and YouTube Music, almost all of which offer their own yearly recap presentations, Spotify should feel pressured to correct these issues if they want to retain their user base.