Spotify Wrapped has been released; a kind of holiday data gift to subscribers. It has also become a social touchpoint and enormous sharing topic.
Wrapped is an annual feature in the Spotify mobile app; it is not presented in the desktop app. When we opened Wrapped on the phone, the experience was soundtracked with our top song of 2025 — a nice touch. “You listened. We counted.” — is proclaimed up front.
The primary metric, first to be presented, is listening time for the year … presented in minutes and days. Following that, we learn that we listened to 387 genres. That surprised us, not because of the range, but because we wouldn’t have estimated that 387 music genres exist. We learn about our top genres, with more than a little surprise — and surprising revelations is one of the most appealing features of this annual exploration.
“Listening age” is a metric gaining a lot of attention in today’s social reactions to Wrapped. It came in high for us, soundtracked by a Beatles clip. We think In our view The Beatles are ageless, and we can imagine that people across a big age spread had an eye-popping reaction to their “listening age.”
Everyone wants to learn what their #1 song is, and Wrapped teases its way into that revelation by revealing total number of different songs the user heard. It then challenges you to predict your favorite. We spent five seconds on this before impatiently moving forward … but Spotify presented a list and insisted we choose. We didn’t recognize a single track on that list. We thought there must be something wrong there, and anticipated reporting a broken part of the Wrapped experience.
But the next swipe revealed a humbling truth. It showed our five top tracks, playable by touching the titles … and we didn’t recognize a single artist/group by name. We stand revealed as ignorant listeners — love of music but unattached to the creator identities. (By the way, that page was broken for us. It revealed the top five tracks, but would only play the #1.)
A quick touch adds the Top Songs list to the user’s library (nestled in with all the previous annual Top Songs lists.
Number of albums listened to (“Long live the album,” Spotify proclaims, not without historic irony.)
On the podcaSt side, Spotify tells its users how many minutes were consumed, the most consumed podcast (and its minutes), and top five podcasts. Important to remember, in this section, that Spotify is delivering metrics from within Spotify, and (as should be obvious) doesn’t count listening to the same podcasts on other platforms.
In the midst of this investigative scrolling, we came to a short video by two hosts of a podcast which is prominent in our account. It starts with a personalized greeting “Hi Ryan.” [cough] We don’t know who Ryan is, but it’s not us, so that earned a double take.
Audiobooks get the Wrapped treatment
The Top Artist presentation is the most glamorous, with lots of animated movement on the screen, and the display is soundtracked with your most-played artist.
Spotify told us: “All of your listening made you part of something bigger.” We suppose that’s true, but are uncertain what it means. The app presents a series of insignias, and we realize that it wants us to join one of them … like Full Orange Crew, perhaps, or Club Serotonin. We don’t mind being un-hip, and we declined … but it threw us into one anyway! Whoa. C’mon Spotify, don’t bully.
Just as we thought the fun was starting to be exhausting, we got to the “victory lap.” We had no idea it was a contest, but onward we forged. It’s a summary, presented in four shareable panels. Anyone who looks for these today in the general online community will doubtless see a lot of ’em.
Still not over?
Hey, we’ll do this all day. And it seems like we might have to. “We pulled some of your case files, just in case,” Spotify oddly announces. That leads to pinpointing which day of the year was biggest for music listening, most diverse listening, biggest The Beatles day, and biggest podcast listening day.
Spotify offers a “Start a party” option, which challenges friends to “a real-time listening battle.” We don’t like losing friends.
Disregard our mordant sarcasm. We love Wrapped and honor data. Spotify has built this thing into an annual cultural event, which is cool and impressive.
