Throughout the year, people listen to hundreds of songs, and dozens of hours of music. One of the US’s most popular music applications, Spotify, releases a personalized presentation to every user summarizing their listening habits throughout the year. This enables people to see a visual of their top songs, artists, and genres, and see how they compare to other fans. The Spotify Wrapped had a release date later than in previous years for the 2024 release, but included several new features compared to older versions.

Like every year, the Wrapped came with a personalized playlist and summary of users’ top songs and artists, as well as their collective listening time, but also came with a new standout feature: the personalized AI podcast. This podcast consisted of two AI-generated hosts who discussed the user’s top genres throughout the year as well as other listening habits. There has been some controversy over the use of AI, as it is still a fairly new and imperfect tool with many people advocating against its use.

Though there were many new features, there was also one old feature that was noticeably absent: the genre sandwich. As this was included in the Wrapped last year, many fans expected it to be present again in 2024, but it never made an appearance. There was still an included summary of listening through the months, but no overall synopsis of the year.

Many fans were left disappointed by the lack of favored features and the evident use of AI throughout the entire presentation, giving it an impersonal feel. “It was significantly worse from last years as it didn’t have anything that was specific to the individual person. They also brought unnecessary hype for it just for it to be a complete let down only taking 5 minutes to get through. It also clearly was not accurate and used AI.” said Alexia Pritchard (12).