The annual roundup of everyone’s favorite music is almost here, and Spotify Wrapped 2025 is just a few weeks away, but there’s one burning question on everyone’s mind: will it be better than last year?
After the major disappointment that was Spotify Wrapped 2024, the only thing subscribers, myself included, are hoping and praying for is that the best music streaming service has learned from last year’s mistakes.
At its open house event in July, Spotify admitted to making mistakes with its Wrapped 2024, which mostly amounted to inaccurate data on Spotify’s part. That said, Spotify then revealed plans to improve this year’s music wrapup – but we, loyal subscribers, will be the judge of that when Spotify Wrapped 2025 releases.
With just a few weeks until it takes the internet by storm again, there are three things in particular that I think Spotify should pay attention to during this year’s Wrapped rollout to avoid repeating last year’s flop.
1. Less AI, more innovation
That’s asking a lot from a platform that glorifies its AI tools, but last year’s Spotify Wrapped was far too focused on collecting personal streaming data using generative AI features, primarily Podcast AI.
Although last year’s AI Podcast was an interesting change for Spotify and the way it presented your Wrapped data, it was still rather superficial and nothing more than a brief summary of your musical year. It didn’t necessarily tell us anything new that wasn’t part of the larger summary of Wrapped; instead, we’ve done without fun, innovative features like Sound Town and its 2023 Myers Briggs-style listening personalities.
2. A Feature Worthy of Breaking the Internet
One of the best aspects of Spotify Wrapped is that there’s always a new feature that easily lends itself to Internet memes, which manages to break the Internet every time, thanks to social media sharing. In 2023, we were lucky to have two: Sound Town and Me in 2023. Last year, we didn’t have any of that.
To say this was a missed opportunity on Spotify’s part is an understatement due to how difficult it was for Sound Town to appear on TikTok and Instagram, so the fact that Spotify decided not to follow suit with a feature worthy of social media trends last year is mind-boggling.
Hopefully Spotify has learned its lesson.
3. Bring back personal ideas
As mentioned, Spotify’s focus on AI has compromised a lot of things, but it’s personal information that’s been missed the most.
Instead of showcasing your most listened to albums of the year or listing your five favorite genres, all of these metrics were sacrificed for the AI podcast roundup, but also for a “revamped” version of AI DJ. Additionally, there was no feature telling you what type of listener you were or how your listening habits had changed over the year. Bringing them back is the minimum requirement for Spotify to redeem itself after last year’s Wrapped rollout, but it could bring other unique insights by highlighting them.
For example, Spotify could summarize your listening year with a single Daylist-style playlist with a disjointed title and new music recommendations to help you kickstart your 2026 — instead of compiling your most-streamed songs of the year into a playlist you probably won’t use.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
