Music plays a large role in a lot of things like culture, people’s lives and society. According to healthline, listening to music can boost memory, lighten your mood and reduce anxiety and depression. So music wraps at the end of the year are sometimes highly anticipated.
Spotify especially was hyping up their wrapped this holiday season with many advertisements about how the wrapped was coming soon, only for Wrapped to come the latest since 2020. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped came out on Nov. 30 and came out Dec. 1 in 2021 and Dec. 2 in 2020.
The disappointment in how late Wrapped came out, coupled with the missing features, such as the genre sandwich featured in Spotify Wrapped 2023, left many people feeling like the longer wait for Wrapped just was not worth it.
“I think it didn’t help that if you looked up wrapped 2024, it would open an infinite loading page in the app,” Elliot Hughes (12) said.
Regardless of how long the wait was, people still listen to Spotify a lot. With January through October being used for data, there are a little under 450,000 minutes that you are able to earn. Some people hit under 50,000 minutes like Tristan Howard (11) with 18,920 minutes. But some people were well over 50,000, personally having gained over 100,000 minutes two years in a row.
Listeners also enjoy seeing what their top artists tell them in their videos that they submit to Spotify, and they like to determine whether their artist was happy to be involved with making a video for their fans or not. Despite all the good, though, the many shortcomings might outweigh the positives.
“The big issue I have with Spotify is that I listen to a lot of music on Alexa and it does not calculate the minutes or the songs I listen to on there at all,” Howard said.
The genres that Spotify generated for users also felt overly AI generated, with genres like Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop and Mallgoth Happy Rock Punk. So on top of the longer wait for Wrapped and the weirdly-named genres, it was also inaccurate. Students and teachers alike felt that their Wrapped may have been inaccurate.
“I just think it was inaccurate overall to get this,” science teacher Bailey Kindle said. “Coldplay was my number three, but I think Coldplay should have been my number one.”
Those with the number one artist they feel is accurate achieved something little people may ever experience: getting in the top 0.01 percent of listeners of their artist. Howard was in the top 0.01 percent of listeners for Frank Sinatra and played one of his songs over 100 times during the year.
Despite falling short, many people still think that Spotify came through, especially since laying off 17 percent of its workforce in December 2023, according to USA today. The only thing we can do is keep those earbuds in and hope for a good Wrapped in 2025.
