Spotify Wrapped 2024 is officially out, and, well, a lot of people hate it.
The popular Wrapped was unveiled on December 4, a bit later than the late-November release last year. That made the hype very real.
In the week leading to the release, news publications and Reddit were teeming with anticipation. Soon after the release, though, bashing ensued.
Over on Reddit, a thread titled simply “2024 Spotify Wrapped was awful” soared to the top of the discussion board with thousands of upvotes and users expressing grievance over what they believe went wrong.
So, What Went Wrong With Spotify Wrapped 2024?
The main issue users have with the 2024 Wrapped is that it’s bland. We could pinpoint three key areas here.
One is that Wrapped 2024 is missing what many users see as the essentials, things like your top albums, genres, and podcasts.
The second issue is the lack of creativity. The addition of the “Musial Evolution” section didn’t sit well with many people, especially considering how creative the company was in past years.
Also, a good portion of subscribers complained that the stats used in Wrapped 2024 were simply not accurate. When combined, these three issues paint a bleak picture of Spotify Wrapped’s current state.
“The quality has regressed,” one disgruntled listener wrote. “My friend has Apple Music and she always looked forward to seeing my Spotify Wrapped every year. My top 3 artists were correct but the last two were not. Some of the songs in my top 10 were not songs I listened to regularly.
Giving Spotify a big “BOO” for not mentioning podcasts, audiobooks, or genres, the user concluded, “It’s not ‘just a feature’ – it’s an eagerly anticipated celebration of our music journeys. Neglecting its quality and what made us look forward to this in the first place is disappointing.”
Another Redditor was even more brutal, writing that the Wrapped this year is “very low effort, ugly, and incomplete/missing information. Everyone was so hyped for Spotify Wrapped this year and it was an awful rollout. I’m genuinely embarrassed for the team that worked on it.”
Lack of Coverage
People were not happy that Wrapped 2024 doesn’t mention genres or albums. These two categories are essential and even the new Amazon Music Delivered, aka Amazon Music Wrapped, has them. Now a good look for Spotify.
Surprisingly enough, podcasts and audiobooks are also not mentioned. This is very odd because Spotify has been investing heavily to grab its share of these two markets in recent years.
Lack of Creativity
A lot of people complaining about Wrapped 2024 reminisced about the feature’s past editions. For example, the 2023 Wrapped showed where people with similar music tastes to yours lived.
Then, the 2021 edition showed your year as a movie. There was also the music aura, the think about cooking with your artists, and much more.
In 2024, there was just the Musical Evolution bit that shows how your listening habits changed throughout the year. Not awful but underwhelming considering how high the bar was set in previous years.
Lack of Accuracy
Apparently, Spotify Wrapped 2024 isn’t accurate enough because the company stopped tracking too soon.
A Reddit user behind the alias of 5starme wrote, “They also stopped tracking way too early. I have 2.78m streams for the year when I should have 3.4m. It means they stopped tracking about a month and a half early. Very underwhelming compared to the extra stats from 2020 wrapped.”
Spotify certainly did stop tracking before Wrapped was released. Personally, I had the new Opeth album on repeat since it came out on November 22, and it wasn’t included in my Wrapped at all. That was less than two weeks before Wrapped dropped, though.
Did Layoffs Play a Role in Worsening Spotify Wrapped?
The artist Elkheart had an interesting take on this matter, writing via Threads:
“Everyone noticing that Spotify wrapped is weak this year should remember that Spotify fired the main dude who created the algorithm for them about a year ago (for no reason) and he was also the mastermind between all the genre related data that essentially keeps the place running.
“Enshitification at its finest folks.
“This dude and other people were fired specifically so their salaries could be reallocated to those at the top, not for any valid reason that would make sense.”
The “main dude” in question is Glenn McDonald, the data alchemist who was fired from the company as part of massive layoffs in December 2023, when 17% of all employees, or 1,500 people, were laid off.
McDonald was also in charge of Spotify’s encyclopedic platform EveryNoise.
Glenn himself chimed in on the matter, writing via Bluesky: “Touching to have Spotify celebrate the 1-year anniversary of my layoff by demonstrating that they could not, in fact, still do Wrapped just as well without me.”
The data scientist also offered a more elaborate post regarding Wrapped 2024 over on Furia.
So, Now What?
While some users have said they will leave Spotify over this, we doubt it will change much in the grand scheme of things.
Wrapped is a disappointment, and I certainly didn’t expect Amazon Music and YouTube Music Recap to do a better job than Spotify in this department.
Personally, I find “Your Top Songs” playlists the most valuable feature of the Wrapped package and I don’t have a lot of complaints this year. But the fact remains that Wrapped has become more than a feature to a lot of Spotify users.
And those users feel let down for a good reason.
In summary, all we can do is join the chorus of disgruntled Spotify listeners and hope the streaming giant gets its act together and makes it up with Spotify Wrapped 2025.
