In 2015, music platform Spotify released its first year of “Wrapped”. Now, in 2024, Morgan students patiently awaited to see their data for the year on Wednesday, December 4th.
Spotify wrapped is a program designed to give users a recap of their listening experience from the year. It is led by a catchy title every year that attempts to capture the “feel of the year.” It tells users things such as how many overall minutes you spent listening to music total, your top artists, and your top songs. All together, making you a playlist based on your listening from the year.
According to Spotify’s Head of Global Music Curation and Discovery, JJ Italiano, “over the course of the year, our editors around the world are constantly monitoring new music and cultural trends to identify important rising tracks and artists.” He went on to say that they monitor other user data such as “in-playlist performance,” a collection of data to understand what tracks and artists users respond to.
According to Vox, when Spotify first took off in 2015, “Year of Music” it didn’t go viral. It is said that 2017 is when it really became big. Now, in 2024 it is bigger than ever with 626 million yearly users according to Backlinko.
This year, Spotify’s theme was “Your Music Evolution.” It introduced a new design that revealed unique phases throughout your year, such as a “boujee football rap” phase. The designs for the program received some backlash as they were heavily AI driven, leaving some users disappointed.
According to Forbes, in December in 2023, Spotify laid off 17% of their workforce. Following this, Spotify CEO, Daniel EK told investors that the impact of said workforce reduction caused “significant challenges”. He also made a remark saying, “it did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated”, furthermore acknowledging that the cuts affected the company.
In Morgan, many students posted their Spotify data and talked about it this past week. Junior, Aasiya Bajwa talked about her opinions on Spotify wrapped, saying that she “liked the concept” as well as the fact that she enjoyed being able to see her data from the year in “quantitative data.”. She reported that her top artist of the year was Nirvana for 2024.
Morgan Junior, Cora Deming also expressed her disappointment saying “I felt like the accuracy of what I listened to was extremely off.” She also didn’t like the way in which her style of music was described and she made a comment about what Spotify decided to be her style for the month of May as “boujee football rap”. This was a style many people received for various months and questioned what the real meaning of that phrase is.
Sophomore Riley Coffin said she enjoys the program because it’s an opportunity “to see what my year was like.” However, she said she didn’t enjoy this year because she felt it “wasn’t as interactive as past years.” Overall, saying she was underwhelmed.
Senior Gavin Baptista also expressed his feelings on his spotify wrap saying “I feel like most of it was accurate but a lot of it was mainly from music I listened to at the beginning of the year.” He also said his top 5 specifically did not seem the most accurate.
Similar to this, senior Jason Mansfield said that he was overall happy with his Spotify wrapped but he doesn’t think it’s accurate for the whole year. He said “I think it stops counting what you’re listening to around August or September because I hadn’t listened to one of my artists in awhile.”
