Everyone’s favorite yearly music roundup is almost here, and Spotify Wrapped 2025 will be landing in just a matter of weeks, but there’s one burning question that everyone is asking: will it be better than last year?
After the major letdown that was Spotify Wrapped 2024, the one thing that subscribers, including myself, are hoping and praying for is that the best music streaming service has learned from last year’s mistakes.
Back during its Open House event in July, Spotify admitted that it made mistakes with your Wrapped 2024, which mainly amounted to inaccurate data on Spotify’s part. With that said, Spotify then revealed its plans to improve this year’s music recap – but us loyal subscribers will be the judge of that when Spotify Wrapped 2025 drops.
With just a few weeks to go before it undoubtedly storms the internet once again, there are three things in particular I think Spotify should pay attention to when rolling out this year’s Wrapped to avoid repeating last year’s flop.
1. Less AI, more innovation
It’s asking a lot from a platform that glorifies its AI tools, but last year’s Spotify Wrapped was far too focused on gathering personal streaming data using generative AI functions, mainly the AI podcast.
While last year’s AI podcast was an interesting shift for Spotify and the way it presented your Wrapped data, it was still rather surface-level and was nothing more than a brief summary of your year in music. It didn’t necessarily tell us anything new that wasn’t part of the wider Wrapped roundup; instead, we went without fun and innovative functions such as Sound Town and its Myers Briggs-style listening personalities from 2023.
2. A feature that’s worthy of breaking the internet
One of the best parts of Spotify Wrapped is that there’s always a new feature that easily lends itself to internet memes, which manages to break the internet every time, thanks to social media shareability. In 2023, we were blessed with two: Sound Town and Me in 2023. Last year, we had none of that.
To say it was a missed opportunity on Spotify’s part is an understatement because of how hard Sound Town popped off across TikTok and Instagram, so the fact that Spotify decided not to follow suit with a social media trend-worthy feature last year is bewildering.
Let’s hope that Spotify has learned its lesson.
3. Bring back personal insights
As mentioned, Spotify’s focus on AI compromised a lot of things, but it was personal insights that were missed the most.
Instead of presenting your most-streamed albums of the year or listing your top five genres, all of these metrics were sacrificed for the AI podcast roundup, but also a ‘revamped’ version of AI DJ. Additionally, there was no feature telling you what type of listener you were or how your listening habits shifted over the year. Bringing these back is the bare minimum requirement for Spotify to redeem itself after last year’s Wrapped rollout, but there are other unique insights it could do with highlighting.
For example, Spotify could summarize your year in listening with a unique Daylist-style playlist with an unhinged title and new music recommendations to help you kick-start your 2026 – as opposed to compiling your most-streamed songs of the year into a playlist you probably won’t use.
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