2w ago

Spotify Wrapped 2024 controversy explained — what you need to know

www.tomsguide.com Spotify Wrapped 2024 controversy explained — what you need to know

What's going on?

[...] Many users are complaining of hallucinated artists' stats, songs they've never heard appearing in most listened lists, and more. Some users aren't happy with the way that Spotify Wrapped looked this year, complaining that it was boring, and not as creative as previous years. [...]

One of the most common complaints seems to be that Spotify Wrapped has misreported on the stats in claims to represent. Now, while this has happened in previous years, this year it seems to be a whole lot more prevalent — as you can see in this Spotify support thread. It's filled with users complaining about top artists they've never listened to, songs appearing in at the top of their lists that they didn't even know existed, or a mixture of the two.
Just anecdotally talking with people outside the internet-o-sphere and you'll quickly find people with iffy Spotify Wrapped statistics. I have friends who listen exclusively to bizarre, underground punk acts, and their Wrappeds were topped by the likes of The Weeknd and Taylor Swift. Even on the Tom's Guide team, we've seen strangeness — our own Millie Fender discovered Swift among her top artists, yet her songs didn't appear in her top 100.

Just read people's reactions online, especially in the trending topic on X or even the announcement thread on Reddit. Many are blaming Spotify's pivot to AI this year for the lack of personality, and some even hold it responsible for their weird Spotify statistics. I have reached out to Spotify for comment, but I am yet to hear a response.

What can we do?
First off, there are other streaming platforms with year-end roundups. Deezer, for example, has unleashed My Deezer Year, and like everything the French streamer does, it's filled with creativity and personality. That's a streaming service with better sound quality too. Apple Music has its Replay feature, which similarly takes you through your year. There are options.
If you're duty-bound to Spotify, then there is a way to really check your most-listened-to artists, songs, and genres — Track your listening with Last.FM, for example, which gives you breakdowns over the course of the year. Whatever happens, I (and many others) are hoping that Spotify Wrapped is a whole lot better next year.

109 comments

Why this even calls for generative AI is beyond me. Just post my top 5 artists and top 5 songs. It's data already available.
Mine said my top artist is Hozier, driving my Goblincore Fantasy Forest phase. I couldn't name a Hozier song since Take Me To Church, a song that falls into Nickelback territory for me, as in sellouts that get way too much playtime. And no idea how that turned into goblins and fantasy forests.
- If you're a corpo, not integrating generative AI somewhere is seen as a misstep. Shareholders want to know that their money is being used on the cutting edge.
  Of course, both groups are clueless as to where generative AI may actually be useful. But ultimately it doesn't matter.
- Only the podcast style overview is ai generated. Since the two voice are not from real human
  
  Goblincore Fantasy Forest, definitely a real human genre.
  
  One of my top artists is "Ape Escape", which is apparently the artist for the first Ape Escape game's soundtrack. You wanna know what the AI podcast said it's genre was? Italian Synth pop.
- Not seeing that Hozier criticism tbh but agree spotify sucks
  
  They seem overrepresented in my algorithms. I don't particularly like them, I don't click on them, I'll even spend limited free skips to rush past them sometimes, yet they seem to be everywhere. I can only assume their label is spending an ungodly amount of money to push them in the algorithm, making me shift from neutral about them to negative. Like how Nickelback was on every radio station despite not really being anything special. Hozier seems to sneak through despite my efforts to curate and train my algorithm intentionally.
  So Hozier represents what is wrong with enshittifying music streaming apps to me. Probably not entirely fair of me, but that is my explanation for why I am confused and mildly irritated Spotify would call them my top artist.
- Listen here, dummy, "AI". Do you understand?
  /s
- Also had goblincore in my genre. Whatever that is...
  
  IIRC, goblincore is an aesthetic related to the more ugly side of nature - think mushrooms, toads, and snakes. But it's like a fashion/lifestyle subculture thing like "dark academia," not a music genre.
  
  I thinks it's more a flavor, than a genre.
  You can get "goblincore" vibes that span genres. ICP would likely be "goblincore" but so would a lot of Billie Eilish, and some Lupe Fiasco.
  Think grungy, anti-establishment type of vibes, regardless of genre. And yes, anti-establishment is subjective, in this case.
- I think that "take my whiskey meat" song is Hozier. It was popular this year. Maybe you listened to it?
  
  Maybe, it doesn't ring a bell but I might recognize it if I heard it.
  I've come to the conclusion my top 5 lists are bunk. I know there is a particular song I listened to at least a half dozen times; neither it nor the artist were on my top lists. Yet somehow Hozier is my top artist? No, it's broken.

I heard that Spotify fired the guy who invented the original Spotify algorithm for everything from wrapped to the discover playlists. I'll look to see if I can find link and update.
Edit: not sure if is what I read originally https://blog.tunemymusic.com/spotify-wrapped-2024-bad-users-complain/
But I remember the quote
“Everyone noticing that Spotify wrapped is weak this year should remember that Spotify fired the main dude who created the algorithm for them about a year ago (for no reason) and he was also the mastermind between all the genre related data that essentially keeps the place running.
“Enshitification at its finest folks.
- Hopefully tidal hires him.
  
  He apparently made both of these sites I found every noise interesting
  https://furia.com/
  https://everynoise.com/#updates
  
  Please don't give them ideas. They have to fix core issue first - catalogue quality where albums from same named bands are often attributed to wrong ones.
- They fired the whole wrapped team and replaced them with some AI nonsense.
  
  I hope Spotify gets all they deserve from that decision.
- Unless Spotify drastically changed their backend it doesn't make sense why firing one person will make algorithms stop working
  
  They didn’t fire one. They fired 1500. Including most of the Wapped team.
- What's so hard about tracking which song has been played how often or even for how long? I can't imagine how you can fuck this up so badly
- Even if they fire him, his code still exists and is still legally theirs.
  
  Ya but who's gonna maintain it? You'd be surprised sometimes how one person's vision is not so easily grasped by another.

mine was on point
- congratulations on being in the 0.001% of all listeners worldw
- Hurtin' hearts need some healin', Take my hand with your glove of love.

Dropped Spotify after the CEO said artists music weren’t worth anything and raised their annual fee at the same time. Trash company

hallucinated
It is just fucking wrong. AI isn't a living thing that is comparable to a person or animal, or even a plant. It is wrong a lot and that is because it has no motivation or reality or anything like that. It is pattern matching that is not reliable for factual results, and sometimes the results are just wrong.
- Good callout. We shouldn't attribute intent, experience, or any other human characteristics, to software.

Can't report the same problem. Mine looked very sane for my listening habits.
- Same. Last.fm also agreed with what Spotify told me.
  
  Same with listenbrainz though it couldnt capture earlier parts of the year for me.

Switched to Napster this year. Best artist payout.
- How old is this? Why is play music here?
  
  Easily 5+ years old. This exact image was posted on Reddit three years ago. GPM shutdown in 2020. I can't find the original page on Digital Music News for this image (source text)
- To be clear, no streaming company is paying royalties on a per-stream basis, it's basically always ((total revenue-platform cut)/share of total amount of streams).
  So the artists are not really getting more money because you're streaming on one platform or the other, they are all getting roughly the same amount out of what you're paying on a monthly basis.
- If artist payout is your primary concern, take a look at qobuz. They pay even more than napster and tidal.
  
  Or actually buy albums lol
- Napster still exists?

i listened to the new eminem album once and it said he was my #2 artist. i had a day where i listened to nothing but aphex twin and he wasn't on the list. busted for sure.

I only stick with spotify because it has the best support on linux
Can any linux users can share their experience with other platforms?
- Bandcamp? works good in a browser and supports artists the most
  
  I think Bandcamp is the only platform where I have actually purchased music in the past decade. It seems like a decent model, and I like getting FLAC versions of a physical album I get.
  Recently got the newest Godspeed You! Black Emperor album off Bandcamp. Great shit as always.
  
  Seconded on Bandcamp, though I don’t stream through it. I just buy albums and play them on whatever music player I have installed. Usually VLC or Amarok!
- Tidal has no official Linux app, which is shocking considering their demographic. But a hero has made an app that gets pretty close. Under the hood it's the web client with some add-ons to support full quality streaming. The user experience is generally fairly close to an official app.
  I used soundiiz to convert all my content over, and of probably over 10,000 songs there were less than 100 unavailable, so library isn't a concern. The increased quality is nice, but the big reason I choose tidal is that instead of doing unnecessary stuff like podcasts they pay artists better. As much as 3X according to some things I've read. I have not verified those numbers.
- I think Deezer has an electron app or something it uses, but it's worked great for me so far. It costs the same aa Spotify the last I checked, and has a comprable selection.
- Do you use the official Spotify client or a third party one like ncspot? Not that the latter will remain for long now considering API changes on Spotify's end.
  
  Official.
  Yeah, if they kill off the official app and neuter the other linux based choices then i'll move on
- Qobuz can be installed with bottles and works pretty well.
  
  You can also get qobuz working through strawberry and it's pretty straight forward. Just need to grab the app secret with qobuz-dl
- I like the Spotify connect feature too. I think there are snaps or flatpaks that wrap the Apple Music web page into an application icon. A desktop app is really mostly relevant if you’re using the app to manage local music files. That said the Spotify connect feature is incredibly useful.
- YouTube music works great, just gotta use an unofficial app

Is there a good way to sync listening history between platforms? That seems to be a big reason why people have a hard time jumping around between platforms
- Lastfm or listenbrainz
  
  There's also libre.fm but IDK if it's any good. I've always been on last.fm it was my first social media.
- It doesn’t sync between services, but last.fm can be your tracking source and connects to both Spotify (when I had it.. assuming still true) and Tidal (ways to track Bandcamp and other streaming too).
  I have to wait for the full calendar year to pass in last.fm, but I get more interesting stats than what I remember from wrapped.
  
  Last.fm is really great for tracking, it's been around for forever too, no idea why it isn't more popular.
- Unfortunately they walled garden themselves pretty universally. I've been on Tidal since Spotify fired all those people and have been really enjoying it.
  Maybe I'm crazy but I feel like their recommended music is also way better.

You mean the corporation you gave boatloads of personal data to is manipulating it to use against you in the pursuit of profit?! [surprised pikachu.jpg]

My Wrapped was way different this year from last year. I listen to music all day every day. I have a 24-hour playlist for every day of the week, Spotify says I listened to 326,614 minutes this year. These playlists are all different. Monday is 70s R&B Motown, Tuesday is Rock/Punk/Grunge, Wednesday is Rocksteady/Two Tone/3rd wave Ska, Thursday is Classical, Friday is Hip Hop, Saturday is Country, and Sunday is Jazz.
Last year my Wrapped had a wide range of artists and genres that represented the wide range of music I listen to. This year it was just Reggae and Ska. I had only two top artists that were not, the Rolling Stones and Glenn Miller. The Rolling Stones I can see but Glenn Miller is not even that prevalent in my Jazz playlist.
I don't know if it's all fucked up but I do know it's miles different than what it gave me for the same playlists and similar listening time last year.
Edit: I fucked up Monday.

My favorite song of the year was something I apparently listened to twice. My favorite artist is some duo that I spent seven minutes listening to. I definitely listened to something else more than that.
But it did know I listened to a lot of Behind the Bastards. It got the podcasts right.

I was disappointed in the graphics, but my stats seemed right. The slide for my top podcasts had black text on a black background, but luckily all my top 5 podcasts have their name on their logo. Still looks kinda stupid though.

It looked wrong when I first clicked it, but then sort of restarted and corrected itself, almost like it started with the wrong data cached.

Your top song was $songThatIReallyListenedToAFewTimes. You had a streak of two days listening to it and your play count was 4.
Ok, the genre is right. The band is a band I know and sometimes listen to, but I dislike their newer songs (which the above is an example of). The start might be right, but it's definitely not my top listened song 2024

Listen to the podcast. It's... Awful. The AI voices trying to do radio show-style things like spelling out some letters of words or enunciating oddly is a whole level of cringe. Plus my podcast was full of hallucinations. Very obviously saying one of my top songs was by a different one of my top artists.
My wrapped stats weren't super off, but they were off. Clearly some artists they favor or punish in rankings. Whether thats intentional, buggy code, or hallucination, eh, who knows.
Either way, it was a reminder that ive been wanting to switch to tidal for a while. The day list used to be really good, too, but it has had a noticeable drop in quality since the last round of layoffs, and it shows a lot more evidence of being AI-based rather than algorithm-based.

Switched to Qobuz earlier this year. It has a few issues, but at least it doesn't have all this absolutely dumb shit that Spotify has. What an improvement.
- And they let you buy the music outright, too!
  Recently quit youtube premium due to the price hike finally hitting my country. I've been using yt music for my listening.
  Since that went away along with yt premium, I dusted off my old music file collection (mix of itunes and bandcamp purchases, cd rips, and soundcloud downloads).
  Discovered Qobus looking for places to buy my favorite music to update my collection.
  I used to keep my entire collection on my phone, but I opted to start using ytm since I had it and my collection got too big...
  But now, I have to say I am blown away with how nice Symfonium+Jellyfin (or another music server) is to use!
  Last time I looked into it, nothing handled dynamically keeping a portion of your music on-device for offline play this well!
  
  Features can't be beat for sure. They skip all the extra BS and just have a quality streaming service. Whodathunk that's all people want? 🤣
- I like Qobuz and am winding down my Spotify usage. Although it doesn't have as many automatic playlists as Spotify, Qobuz does better at recommending music that's unfamiliar and interesting, whereas Spotify seems to have been circling me around the same drain of 10 songs for months. Qobuz sounds noticably better than Spotify too, on my good headphones. And it has so much information about each album, including CD booklets for many of them. In particular for classical music Qobuz gives you the composer, the players, the conductor, the piece and the movement, whereas Spotify doesn't know what to do.
  
  The format sent to clients is better. I would disagree with the recommendations point, but that's subjective.
- It just frustrates me how nobody is even close to Spotify Connect nor do they seem to be trying to compete with it. Tidal only half does what I need but I have had a number of major issues with it that are making me go back to Spotify.
  
  That's your problem? What does it provide that nothing else does?

I just want unlimited audiobook listening this 15 hours thing is bullshit. I nearly dropped spotify the second I got that notification out of spite.
- But you didn't drop them and therefore told them via your spending/usage that you're ok with this 15 hour thing (i don't use spotify so i don't know what that is)
  
  After 15 listening hours they let you finish the chapter then block listening until the next month and its a stupid amount of money to top up. Unfortunately I have all my music and podcasts tied to the base service and thats the only thing keeping me there. If I'm paying a monthly fee I feel entitled to unlimited anything.
- There's no way they could pay to give you unlimited audiobooks with any kind of library at all.
  You can get a library included with an Audible subscription, but it's pretty limited, mostly to their own stuff, or Everand has a limited library included with a subscription (but you only get the stuff you use their limited credit system on while you have an active subsctiption, so I cancelled once they switched models).
  The only reasonable alternative to what Spotify has is not doing audiobooks.

I use a self hosted playback tracker.
The top 3 were matching for self hosted and Spotify, but the last two in the top 5 were completely different. No matter which way I sorted it (time vs plays), the self hosted tracker was correct.

It definitely sucked this year. The stats were just boring and not as extensive. One thing I found weird was that after watching my wrapped, I got an alert to check out my stats. But the alert gave me a stat that was interesting, but it wasn’t included in my wrapped. It’s almost like Spotify forgot to include all the stats in the wrapped that it meant to.

I didn’t expect it to include podcasts this year, so it outed me to a work colleague (there was a gay podcast I tried in it). He was chill about it, but why the fuck are podcasts even in Wrapped?

Mine says my most played artist is Necroticgorebeast. I've never even heard of them. And that name is just so Repugnant!
- My wife got Taylor Swift and she never listens to her. My first thought was it must be some kind of hallucination because that doesn’t seem like actual data to me. Even an occasional listen shouldn’t make her top artist.
  
  I've always just ignored these lists because I play music for my kids' bedtime so it's on every night, all night - therefore my data is always skewed towards kids songs.
  Also - my original post is a little cheeky. They're one of my favourite bands and their latest album is called "Repugnant." LOL

Wasnt aware of this issue. Mine was accurate.

I switched to Spotube because none of the music apps even have most of the weird songs I listen too, but I still have spotify only for podcasts because there aren't any platforms that have all the ones I listen too and I'm not looking into finding new ones.
I also don't want to have 10 apps for 1 podcast each, the closest replacement would be YT music but in their infinite wisdom they combined accounts across videos and music, I don't want to see followed music artists in my subscriptions on the video app and I'm not paying for 2 premium accounts to keep them separate.
Also apple podcast & music sounds like it might be enough, but I'm now switching to iOS only for podcasts, I like my sideloaded apps thank you.
Sorry I had to vent as this as been pissing me off for a long while.
- If you're on Android, I use AntennaPod for all my podcasts. It's FOSS that pulls from all the various podcast sources; I have yet to run across a podcast I couldn't add to my rotation
  If you're ever looking to cut out Spotify completely, maybe see if that fits what you need.
  
  Its been a few days of using the app and honestly I'm loving it a lot more than Spotifys UI, only downside is no good way discover new podcasts similar to what I like but honestly that's an easy internet search, so I guess there are no downsides that I can't easily fix.
  
  Thanks for the suggestion, will check it out
- Technically you could use apple music on Android though?
  But then we have the double payment problem again.

That explains a lot. I looked at the wrap and the "podcast" and they reported different top songs. The podcast was actually closer to what I expected than my actual list.

I use YouTube Music and I noted the exact same problem this year.

While I have always seen songs on my wrapped that I definitely enjoyed, I was sceptical of some of the most listened to ones. Didn't seem right.

Honestly this is so annoying to me. It's akin to posting 4th of July videos of fireworks.

Slow news day? Who gives a literal fuck
- This is happening because Spotify laid off half it's staff and thought it could get away with it.
- Not every news story needs to be earth shattering. Some can be about mundane things people enjoy.

109 comments