This past December, you might’ve noticed everyone sharing Spotify screenshots on their Instagram stories, dashboards and timelines. At the end of every year, a viral marketing campaign called Spotify Wrapped is released. It is a collection of an individual user’s data, typically including top songs, genres, and artists.
This year, many users remarked that it felt out of place among previous years’ Wrapped, and that there seemed to be much less effort put into the program than in prior years.
The lackluster performance may have a reason, however, as it was revealed that Spotify laid off 17% of its workforce, over 1,500 workers, including one of the lead product designers and the lead motion designer, as well as Glenn McDonald, who built Spotify’s data alchemy tool. The layoffs were announced in December 2023, after the Wrapped for 2023 was released.
In my opinion, 2023 was the best Wrapped so far, including features like where in the world people listen to your top artists the most, and what you listened to your top artists the most.
This year’s Wrapped was apparently either rushed, or there was little to no human work used to make it. It was filled to the brim with AI features, like AI-made playlists of your most popular songs or an AI “podcast”, voiced by two people who aren’t real, summarizing the stats from your Wrapped.
One of the most complained-about features was the “Music Evolution”, showing three randomly selected months and including random, mostly irrelevant phrases above to vaguely describe the type of music most listened to in one of those months. Some of the nonsensical, pointless “genres” shared from this part of Wrapped were “Vampire Shotgun Rap”, “Pink Pilates Pop Princess”, “Indie Sleaze Roller-Skating Pop”, or “Theatrical Actor Dark Cabaret”. This category of Wrapped replaced the genres section, which had been included in Wrapped beforehand.
The Current ran a survey in December to gather opinions on this year’s Wrapped from the H-B community. Responses around music choices varied, but they all seemed to ring true with one message about the process: this year’s Spotify Wrapped was not good.
Some students said they were slightly disappointed, while others were blatantly cursing Spotify out– for good reason, in my opinion. As one student stated, “It’s funny how they fired the guy with all the genre data so we got ‘Indie Sleaze Permanent Wave Rock’ instead of actual genres.”
Other students also shared the sentiment in their responses, saying this year’s Wrapped lacked soul, was inaccurate, seemed filled with AI, or that they just didn’t enjoy it as much as previous years.
Unfortunately, Spotify seems to think this is an improvement on Wrapped and the user experience, and they will likely continue to diminish the quality of Wrapped and lay off even more of their workers, all for the sake of profit.
