‘Boring’: This year’s #SpotifyWrapped is getting roasted online
You know that feeling when something that’s been hyped a lot ends up being underwhelming? For the past week, the chronically online have been waking up daily to check if their Spotify Wrapped has dropped so they can know their top artists, music genres, songs, and more for 2024. But now that it has been released, it’s safe to say everyone is disappointed.
Every December, Spotify drops a personalized highlight reel for each user, compiling their activity data for the year. From the number of minutes of music streamed to the genre that a particular country or city listened to the most, it’s all presented via cool graphics and fun, interactive categories like Spotify personalities, your music aura, and more. There are also overall stats for the music industry, such as the most streamed songs and artists, most listened to podcasts, and so on. Sharing your #SpotifyWrapped on your socials is like being part of a club that gives users something engaging to discuss and bond over.
This year, Spotify Wrapped made us all wait quite a bit after dropping an initial teaser, driving people to post memes about how the anticipation was killing them. But now that Spotify Wrapped 2024 has arrived, it has been quite a letdown. It’s like you waited all year for your favorite artist to drop their new album, and it sounds nothing like the style that you loved!
The consensus is that this year’s Spotify Wrapped is boring. Specifically, it lacks the fun, quirky stats that would surprise us and make us want to share it on our socials. Remember when they were categorized by astrological signs once? What happened to that? Instead, we got some weird monthly phases that left people awkwardly bamboozled! One X (formerly Twitter) user summarized it perfectly: “Spotify Wrapped flopped this year so bad like where are the music cities, the playlists, the top genres or the listening auras… all that wait for WHAT.”
And why are the graphics so blah? Especially at a time when people are so particular about the aesthetics of what they share on their social media profiles, getting the visuals right was a huge part of what made Spotify Wrapped a highly anticipated digital event every year. One X user wrote: “This has to be fake this is actually the worst Spotify wrapped ever in terms of graphics and data all included.”
The biggest criticism has been this year’s lack of data. Why won’t Spotify show us stats like ‘Top 5 albums streamed’ when fans have asked for this for a while? What’s more, the app would normally turn a user’s most streamed songs into a playlist, but that has been left out of this year’s compilation, too. One X user posted: “9 years of Spotify Wrapped and they STILL don’t add your top albums it is a MUSIC platform what is their fucking problem.”
So while there were the usual self-deprecating memes about what your Wrapped says about you, people are now roasting the Spotify Wrapped 2024 and claiming that the wait has not been worthwhile. Some claimed the promo for Wrapped 2024 was better than the final product, while others called it “LAZY.” One user simply wrote, “Spotify Wrapped was NOT worth the hype this year.”
A few users even speculated if the massive layoffs at Spotify in December 2023—1500 staffers were let go—had impacted what was clearly a lazy compilation because it looks AI-generated and lacks the human insight that made this activity fun. As one user noted, “Spotify Wrapped is underwhelming and reeks of ai… there seems to be real lack of effort this year from the boring visuals to the missing genres and quirks.”
With every app from Apple Music to even Letterboxd coming up with their own versions of Wrapped, the competition for year-in-review roundups has never been more intense. For Spotify to drop the ball now is a sour note. I guess there’s always next year, eh?
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