Spotify Wrapped misses the mark with this one joyless feature

This year’s Spotify Wrapped came with an odd surprise. The app’s annual roundup featured more than just the usual candy-colored data about which artists, songs, and podcasts users streamed the most. It included a “Wrapped AI podcast” feature, using Google’s NotebookLM technology to verbally recap users’ listening habits. 

This bizarre addition is more than just an audio companion for the information presented in Wrapped. Two NPR-inflected, artificial-intelligence voices go through your listening highlights in a conversational (albeit still robotic) manner while elaborating on your “moods,” “vibes,” and interests throughout the year. It feels both like listening to a doctor go through your bloodwork results and a psychic vaguely supposing facts about your life. 

For example, my “hosts” suggested that I was embracing a “bolder” vibe during the month of September based on the movie soundtracks I was consuming. “The Challengers soundtrack and Ludwig Göransson’s work on Oppenheimer makes me wonder if you were watching some intense movies during this time,” one of my “hosts” speculated. This wasn’t totally untrue. But I also wasn’t sure why I needed to be told this information about myself. 

The purpose of this new feature isn’t exactly clear. The podcast element feels even less inspired than some of the other strange personalization features the music streamer has launched in the past, from an AI DJ who greets users by their name, to “sound towns” the listener supposedly lives in, to this year’s incoherent labels representing different moods (like whatever “Pink Pilates Princess Vogue Pop” is). These features are presented as attempts to connect with users on an intimate level, but they’ve largely proven to be great marketing strategies in all their absurdity.  

“The goal of Wrapped, in particular, is brand virality,” says Glenn McDonald, former data alchemist at Spotify. “There’s not much in the way this year of data storytelling.”

Overall, the Spotify listening experience has never felt more alien.  

Spotify’s personalization features are getting weird 

The app, which launched in 2008, has long been appreciated — and bemoaned — for its user-specific, algorithmically generated playlists and myriad compilations designed for any mood, task, and time of the day. However, its newer personalization features, with an emphasis on AI technology, have gotten a little out of hand. While its technology is designed to understand users’ tastes, it is exactly that understanding that keeps users in a repetitive comfort zone of songs, artists, and genres forever.

In 2023, the app rolled out an AI-powered DJ service called “DJ X,” currently available as “DJ: Wrapped.” Using an assortment of users’ most played songs and forgotten favorites, the feature imitates the FM radio experience — only without the crucial element of discovery and a human guide. The AI DJ — who uses the replicated voice of Spotify’s Head of Cultural Partnerships, Xavier “X” Jernigan — offers a vague preamble in between songs: either basic facts about the artists or what mood they think the next song will evoke. It feels more like an attempt at a guided relaxation ritual than an adventurous listening experience. (Of course, users also have the option to skip songs.)

Another AI-powered tool Spotify introduced earlier this year is called “AI Playlist.” Users can either enter a description of the type of playlist they want to listen to or select a prompt, and generative AI will whip it right up. While you can request any kind of mix you want, the prompts seems to encourage listening to music the user is already familiar with. For example, the page currently suggests users try asking the tool to “put [their] top Wrapped songs in order of release date” or “give [them] a playlist of the genre [they] listened to the most.” 

Some of these features have gotten a lot more gimmicky. As a result, they’ve become effective marketing tools. Back in February, the app launched the trippy, cosmic-themed tool “Song Psychic,” which mimics a Magic 8 ball. Users select pre-written questions about their future and are given a (familiar) song in return. More widely known is the feature “Daylist,” which quickly spread across social media when it arrived earlier this year. The “hyper-personalized” playlist changes throughout the day to supposedly reflect the user’s mood, based on their listening habits during certain times of the day. It’s largely garnered attention for its AI-generated playlist titles that look like word salad (“rage people pleaser wednesday evening,” for example). 

It’s unclear whether the “AI podcast” will be a mainstay of Spotify Wrapped or if Google NotebookLM will be integrated further into the app. The “research assistant” allows users to receive summaries and additional information of documents using Google’s Gemini chatbot. However, its function, as far as the podcast goes, seems a bit redundant for the user. It’s mainly proof of how well Google NotebookLM can perform rather than something that enhances user experience in a substantial way.

Are all these AI tools just making us self-absorbed? 

These features don’t just demonstrate how well Spotify knows you, but how predictable your behavior on the app is. These inventions can be fun to play around with. Sometimes, they’re exactly what users need at the moment. But to what end do streaming services need to keep reinforcing and catering to our own moods and preferences? 

McDonald, who now runs the music directory Every Noise At Once, says it’s a normal inclination for users to want to listen to music they already like. “There certainly are retention metrics that say that, unsurprisingly, people like listening to the things that they like,” he says. “But unless you really try actual adventurous experiments on what people might react to, you really don’t know.”

During his decade of working at Spotify, McDonald says the streaming service has never focused on what “it takes to get people curious.”

While Spotify has a popular Discover Weekly playlist that features new songs and artists based around users’ tastes, there are less easily discoverable features designed for exploration on the app’s interface. Compare that to playlists the app offers prominently, like Your Time Capsule, On Repeat, and Repeat Rewind, all bringing users back to their listening comfort zone. 

All of these efforts to know listeners ignore music as an interactive art form. These Spotify features suggest that music is entirely about your own pleasure and ease and not something that’s meant to be engaged with, sought out, and even criticized. The user-focused promotion of AI doubles down on these habits. Listeners are supposed to be delighted that a robot knows every little thing about them, while never challenging them to expand or change. All in all, these AI-powered features promote a narcissistic and, frankly, dull approach to art. 

“The argument for streaming services is that all the world’s music is now accessible to you,” says McDonald. “But if all you do is listen to what you already know, it’s like giving someone a teleporter and they only use it to teleport back home.”