Hi!
My opinion on Wrapped is that the quality of the feature has decreased almost steadily each year. Honestly, I haven't ever felt like the data from Wrapped represented my music tastes or my listening habits very accurately, which I think comes from a combination of factors like family listening, using other services, listening a lot on playlists, etc. However, it's usually still of interest to me and I get something out of it, especially comparing the results with my family and friends.
This year it felt both less accurate and less interesting than usual, and there was just substantially less in the Wrapped in the first place. I do think I used the app less often than usual, due to other issues with Spotify and having moved some of my time to other services. Still, even if the Wrapped couldn't represent my overall music habits, it could have been more useful for insight into my habits on Spotify and more interesting.
There were fewer features to the Wrapped highlight video than in previous years, and some of the features were not as good. The 'music evolution' segment was an interesting concept, but in execution it was cheesy and didn't seem fitting. Titles like 'Post-Apocalyptic Movie Tunes Soundtrack' are, first of all, very redundant, and they don't seem to represent either a genre or a coherent vibe. I much prefer when the features in Wrapped center around genres, albums, or at least an era or vibe of music that a typical person would describe themself listening to. I don't know if the word salad titles here are meant to be colorful and appealing, but I tend to find them simply annoying.
My top artist list was not remotely what I would have expected, leading me to feel like it was based on relatively brief phases in my listening or playtime on songs that I skipped over. Again, my reduced use of the platform and my habit may account for a lot of this, but I just feel even less than usual like Wrapped is accurate to my experience.
Which, to be honest, I wouldn't mind in of itself, if the platform simply wasn't collecting user information except for the purposes of sustaining our collections and playlists and for suggesting music - I don't NEED the platform to collect month to month data on everything I do and then repeat it back to me. But if that information is going to be collected and Wrapped is going to be a part of the Spotify Premium package I do expect it to be both more accurate and more interesting.
I also am generally not a fan of the use of generative AI on Spotify for playlists and I was frustrated to see it tying into Wrapped. I haven't listened to the 'podcast' and have no interest in doing so, as it doesn't sound interesting at all, I didn't particularly want my data fed from Spotify to Google Notebook LM or whatever it was, and I don't support Spotify's increasing use of AI on the platform. Obviously the platform has always used algorithms and our data to come up with Discover Weekly, playlist suggestions, etc, but including new and separate AI systems when there's so much discourse around the pitfalls of AI right now is not a good look to me. Looking at the 'AI Playlist 2024 Wrapped' it's not immediately clear what AI program is being used for this feature or how it works.
We don't know if this feature and similar features are sharing our Spotify data with other companies, if they're as inaccurate and buggy as other AI systems - actually, for all we know, they could be trained on other people's playlists without consent or acknowledgement.
I know there's a large variety in how AI systems work and therefore not all of them have the same downsides, but generally I am more put off by them than interested in them. And I wonder if these features are part of why Wrapped was worse this year.
All in all, I wasn't satisfied. I'm on a family subscription for premium, but I am planning to spend more of my time on other services instead of Spotify, and if my family ever cancels I don't currently see the point in continuing with my own subscription. Wrapped is probably the least of the problems I have with the platform, but it's one of the ways Spotify is supposed to distinguish itself and it's just failing in that more and more over time.
