It’s Spotify Wrapped season, which means social media users can once again scrutinize and share their listening habits with their friends.
The platform’s personalized end-of-year user streaming data launched Wednesday, bringing a flood of social media posts from people revealing their top listens of 2024.
This year, Spotify unveiled a feature called “music evolution,” which allows users to examine their changing preferences over the year. Similar to Spotify’s “daylist,” it will give users personalized, niche music profiles to describe their taste during these “phases.” Users can also see what their longest listening streaks are for their top artists.
Numerous users posted screenshots showcasing their “pink pilates princess” phase this year, which many associated with music that’s popular among the LGBTQ+ community.
Spotify also introduced a personal AI-generated podcast that gives users overviews of their listening habits. The podcast was made using Google’s Notebook LM app, which went viral this year for its ability to create summary podcasts with realistic-sounding hosts from people’s notes.
While some listeners celebrated the release of Wrapped, others online said they felt underwhelmed by the new features. Some asked Spotify to bring back last year’s “sound towns,” which matched users with a city that had similar music taste to them.
As usual, Spotify also included a list of the global artists, podcasts and authors who received the most streams this year.
Unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift, who has had a dominant couple of years with her Eras Tour and the release of her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” snagged the top artist spot. She amassed over 26.6 billion streams this year, according to Spotify.
The Weeknd and Bad Bunny were the second and third most-streamed artists, respectively.
Despite Drake’s recently accusing Spotify and Universal Music Group of artificially inflating the streaming numbers for Kendrick Lamar’s diss track against him, “Not Like Us,” Drake was still the fourth most-streamed artist this year. Billie Eilish followed him in the No. 5 spot.
Meanwhile, “Not Like Us” did not land on the top global songs list, but it was the second most-streamed song in the U.S. this year. The track had over 928 million streams Wednesday morning.
The most-streamed song globally, according to Spotify, was Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which had over 1.6 billion streams Wednesday morning.
On the podcast front, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” and “This Past Weekend with Theo Von” were among the top five podcasts globally. The shows made headlines this year when Rogan and Von each hosted President-elect Donald Trump ahead of the election and Cooper hosted Vice President Kamala Harris.
Spotify also revealed its first top global audiobooks list after it introduced 15 free hours of audiobook listening to its Premium subscribers last year. BookTok favorite author Sarah J. Maas took the No. 1 spot with her book “A Court of Thorns and Roses” and the No. 3 spot with its sequel, “A Court of Mist and Fury.”
