A wild look back on Spotify Wrapped and how much it’s changed since the first one

It used to have a completely different name

9 hours ago

Spotify Wrapped is the gift that keeps on giving at the start of every December. What more could you want out of the Christmas season than to be shown data that’s been collected on you in a fun way you can brag about on your Instagram story for a day? Since 2016 we’ve been laughing, cringing and sometimes genuinely concerned at our Spotify Wrapped results at the end of each year. But, in all the bustle of seeing who your favourite artist was, you may not have realised just how much Spotify Wrapped has changed over the years. Let’s take a look back on Spotify Wrapped and how different it is now compared to its debut in 2016.

Spotify Wrapped began with a completely different name

Spotify Wrapped was born in 2016, but in 2015, they released a similar feature called Year In Music. It was basically a much more boring, data-based Spotify Wrapped without all the fun features. You didn’t even need an account with Spotify at the time, so how accurate could it really have been?

The worst part about this was it wasn’t even personal. Instead, it was Spotify’s year in review of top lists, a fans’ year in review, and an artists’ year in review. Only five million users tuned in. There was nothing that made it tailored to you at all, however, it set the foundations for Wrapped that would come a year after.

2016 was the beginning of Wrapped as we know it

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In 2016, Spotify rebranded the Year in Music as Spotify Wrapped and launched the iconic Your Top Songs playlist. This meant personal data was now being rebranded in a fun way. However, you didn’t get anything about your top artists or genres.

The main problem from 2016-2018 was that Wrapped was a web page and you couldn’t access it in the app. Very strange!

2019 onwards

2019 onwards was when Wrapped really started to develop for the better

Wrapped went from 5 million users to 227 million in 2023, proving the upwards spike from 2019-2023 was huge. We started getting all those weird genres of music like rollerskate pop, we were able to see more data about podcasts, and we even got to see our favourite songs in each city. 2023 was definitely the peak of Spotify Wrapped

Controversial opinion, but Wrapped 2024 was very disappointing

On the other hand, Spotify Wrapped 2024 changed for the worse. It was all AI generated, with this strange podcast speaking robotically trying to pass as a real person telling me I listened to 11,000 minutes of Taylor Swift this year. After the trajectory from 2016 to now, we can hope next year will be better!

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