For Sydney Brown, the annual release of Spotify Wrapped, the personalized rundown of her music streaming habits, has always been a momentous occasion.
“All of my friends say it is like my Super Bowl,” said Ms. Brown, 23, who lives in Manhattan. But when she logged on to the streaming platform on Wednesday to see how Spotify would define her musical tastes this year, she found that instead of flashy new features like the Sound Towns of 2023, the offerings were lackluster and felt impersonal.
Her Spotify Wrapped, she said, “felt like a homework project that was turned in late.”
Ms. Brown is part of a vocal cohort of Spotify’s 640 million users who typically share their Wrapped results proudly, but this year she and many others found that new features generated by artificial intelligence — such as a podcast about their listening habits and word-salad-like summaries of their favorite genres — fell flat. On Reddit, TikTok and Twitter, users posted about their disappointment.
A delayed Wrapped built anticipation with little payoff.Spotify Wrapped was released a few days later in 2024 than in previous years, leading many users to believe that exciting new features were in store.
Posts and videos on social media described users on the edge of their seats. “I try to be the chill girl but WHERE IS SPOTIFY WRAPPED,” one user said on X.
“The hype was so loud,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the youth trends newsletter “After School,” in which she recently included a TikTok with the caption: “The wait for Spotify has driven me to insanity.”
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