Everyone’s favorite annual music roundup is almost here, and Spotify Wrapped 2025 is arriving in just a few weeks, but there’s one burning question on everyone’s mind: Will it be better than last year?
After the huge disappointment that was Spotify Wrapped 2024, the only thing subscribers, myself included, hope and pray is that the best music streaming service has learned from last year’s mistakes.
During its open house event in July, Spotify admitted that it made mistakes with its Wrapped 2024, which mainly consisted of inaccurate data on Spotify’s part. That said, Spotify later revealed its plans to improve this year’s music wrap, but we loyal subscribers will be the judge of that when Spotify Wrapped 2025 comes out.
With just a few weeks left until it undoubtedly takes the internet by storm once again, there are three things in particular that I think Spotify should pay attention to when releasing this year’s Wrapped to avoid repeating last year’s failure.
1. Less AI, more innovation
It’s asking a lot of a platform that glorifies its AI tools, but last year’s Spotify Wrapped was too focused on collecting personal streaming data using generative AI features, primarily the AI podcast.
While last year’s AI podcast was an interesting change for Spotify and the way it presented its Wrapped data, it was still pretty superficial and nothing more than a brief summary of its year in music. It didn’t necessarily tell us anything new that wasn’t part of Wrapped’s broader summary; instead, we’re left without fun, innovative features like Sound Town and its Myers Briggs-style auditory personalities starting in 2023.
2. A feature that is worthy of revolutionizing the Internet
One of the best parts about Spotify Wrapped is that there’s always a new feature that lends itself easily to internet memes, which manages to break the internet every time, thanks to the ability to share on social media. In 2023, we were blessed with two: Sound Town and Me in 2023. Last year we didn’t have any of those.
To say it was a missed opportunity on Spotify’s part is an understatement given how strongly Sound Town appeared on TikTok and Instagram, so the fact that Spotify decided not to do the same with a trend-worthy feature on social media last year is baffling.
Let’s hope Spotify has learned its lesson.
3. Recover your personal knowledge
As mentioned, Spotify’s focus on AI compromised a lot, but it was the personal insights that were missed the most.
Instead of featuring their most-streamed albums of the year or listing their top five genres, all of these metrics were sacrificed for AI’s podcast roundup, but also for a “revamped” version of AI DJ. Additionally, there was no feature to tell you what type of listener you were or how your listening habits changed over the year. Bringing them back is the minimum requirement for Spotify to redeem itself after last year’s release of Wrapped, but there are other unique ideas it could do with highlighting.
For example, Spotify could wrap up your year of listening with a single Daylist-style playlist with a crazy title and new music recommendations to help you kick-start your 2026, rather than compiling your most-streamed songs of the year into a playlist you probably won’t use.
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