[…] Many users are complaining of hallucinated artists’ stats, songs they’ve never heard appearing in most listened lists, and more. Some users aren’t happy with the way that Spotify Wrapped looked this year, complaining that it was boring, and not as creative as previous years. […]
One of the most common complaints seems to be that Spotify Wrapped has misreported on the stats in claims to represent. Now, while this has happened in previous years, this year it seems to be a whole lot more prevalent — as you can see in this Spotify support thread. It’s filled with users complaining about top artists they’ve never listened to, songs appearing in at the top of their lists that they didn’t even know existed, or a mixture of the two.
Just anecdotally talking with people outside the internet-o-sphere and you’ll quickly find people with iffy Spotify Wrapped statistics. I have friends who listen exclusively to bizarre, underground punk acts, and their Wrappeds were topped by the likes of The Weeknd and Taylor Swift. Even on the Tom’s Guide team, we’ve seen strangeness — our own Millie Fender discovered Swift among her top artists, yet her songs didn’t appear in her top 100.
Just read people’s reactions online, especially in the trending topic on X or even the announcement thread on Reddit. Many are blaming Spotify’s pivot to AI this year for the lack of personality, and some even hold it responsible for their weird Spotify statistics. I have reached out to Spotify for comment, but I am yet to hear a response.
What can we do?
First off, there are other streaming platforms with year-end roundups. Deezer, for example, has unleashed My Deezer Year, and like everything the French streamer does, it’s filled with creativity and personality. That’s a streaming service with better sound quality too. Apple Music has its Replay feature, which similarly takes you through your year. There are options.
If you’re duty-bound to Spotify, then there is a way to really check your most-listened-to artists, songs, and genres — Track your listening with Last.FM, for example, which gives you breakdowns over the course of the year. Whatever happens, I (and many others) are hoping that Spotify Wrapped is a whole lot better next year.
Why this even calls for generative AI is beyond me. Just post my top 5 artists and top 5 songs. It’s data already available.
Mine said my top artist is Hozier, driving my Goblincore Fantasy Forest phase. I couldn’t name a Hozier song since Take Me To Church, a song that falls into Nickelback territory for me, as in sellouts that get way too much playtime. And no idea how that turned into goblins and fantasy forests.
If you’re a corpo, not integrating generative AI somewhere is seen as a misstep. Shareholders want to know that their money is being used on the cutting edge.
Of course, both groups are clueless as to where generative AI may actually be useful. But ultimately it doesn’t matter.
Not seeing that Hozier criticism tbh but agree spotify sucks
They seem overrepresented in my algorithms. I don’t particularly like them, I don’t click on them, I’ll even spend limited free skips to rush past them sometimes, yet they seem to be everywhere. I can only assume their label is spending an ungodly amount of money to push them in the algorithm, making me shift from neutral about them to negative. Like how Nickelback was on every radio station despite not really being anything special. Hozier seems to sneak through despite my efforts to curate and train my algorithm intentionally.
So Hozier represents what is wrong with enshittifying music streaming apps to me. Probably not entirely fair of me, but that is my explanation for why I am confused and mildly irritated Spotify would call them my top artist.
Only the podcast style overview is ai generated. Since the two voice are not from real human
Goblincore Fantasy Forest, definitely a real human genre.
Hey don’t talk poorly of the GobliFantaForestCore community. It’s a thriving scene and just because you’re not sophisticated enough to get it doesn’t mean you can put it down
Listen here, dummy, “AI”. Do you understand?
/s
Dropped Spotify after the CEO said artists music weren’t worth anything and raised their annual fee at the same time. Trash company
hallucinated
It is just fucking wrong. AI isn’t a living thing that is comparable to a person or animal, or even a plant. It is wrong a lot and that is because it has no motivation or reality or anything like that. It is pattern matching that is not reliable for factual results, and sometimes the results are just wrong.
My favorite song of the year was something I apparently listened to twice. My favorite artist is some duo that I spent seven minutes listening to. I definitely listened to something else more than that.
But it did know I listened to a lot of Behind the Bastards. It got the podcasts right.
My Wrapped was way different this year from last year. I listen to music all day every day. I have a 24-hour playlist for every day of the week, Spotify says I listened to 326,614 minutes this year. These playlists are all different. Monday is 70s R&B Motown, Tuesday is Rock/Punk/Grunge, Wednesday is Rocksteady/Two Tone/3rd wave Ska, Thursday is Classical, Friday is Hip Hop, Saturday is Country, and Sunday is Jazz.
Last year my Wrapped had a wide range of artists and genres that represented the wide range of music I listen to. This year it was just Reggae and Ska. I had only two top artists that were not, the Rolling Stones and Glenn Miller. The Rolling Stones I can see but Glenn Miller is not even that prevalent in my Jazz playlist.
I don’t know if it’s all fucked up but I do know it’s miles different than what it gave me for the same playlists and similar listening time last year.
Edit: I fucked up Monday.
Your top song was $songThatIReallyListenedToAFewTimes. You had a streak of two days listening to it and your play count was 4.
Ok, the genre is right. The band is a band I know and sometimes listen to, but I dislike their newer songs (which the above is an example of). The start might be right, but it’s definitely not my top listened song 2024
It looked wrong when I first clicked it, but then sort of restarted and corrected itself, almost like it started with the wrong data cached.
Is there a good way to sync listening history between platforms? That seems to be a big reason why people have a hard time jumping around between platforms
Lastfm or listenbrainz
It doesn’t sync between services, but last.fm can be your tracking source and connects to both Spotify (when I had it… assuming still true) and Tidal (ways to track Bandcamp and other streaming too).
I have to wait for the full calendar year to pass in last.fm, but I get more interesting stats than what I remember from wrapped.
Unfortunately they walled garden themselves pretty universally. I’ve been on Tidal since Spotify fired all those people and have been really enjoying it.
Maybe I’m crazy but I feel like their recommended music is also way better.
I use a self hosted playback tracker.
The top 3 were matching for self hosted and Spotify, but the last two in the top 5 were completely different. No matter which way I sorted it (time vs plays), the self hosted tracker was correct.
Wasnt aware of this issue. Mine was accurate.
Switched to Qobuz earlier this year. It has a few issues, but at least it doesn’t have all this absolutely dumb shit that Spotify has. What an improvement.
I like Qobuz and am winding down my Spotify usage. Although it doesn’t have as many automatic playlists as Spotify, Qobuz does better at recommending music that’s unfamiliar and interesting, whereas Spotify seems to have been circling me around the same drain of 10 songs for months. Qobuz sounds noticably better than Spotify too, on my good headphones. And it has so much information about each album, including CD booklets for many of them. In particular for classical music Qobuz gives you the composer, the players, the conductor, the piece and the movement, whereas Spotify doesn’t know what to do.
The format sent to clients is better. I would disagree with the recommendations point, but that’s subjective.
It just frustrates me how nobody is even close to Spotify Connect nor do they seem to be trying to compete with it. Tidal only half does what I need but I have had a number of major issues with it that are making me go back to Spotify.
That’s your problem? What does it provide that nothing else does?
Primarily, remote control from one PC to another. I’ve got a desktop connected to my speakers but when working from home I want to use my work laptop to control the speakers. Tidal has a version of it that can control media streamer devices, but it is unreliable.
Seamlessly switching between music players. I can have a song playing on my computer, then switch to my phone when I get in the car.
I tried Tidal earlier this year and that was one of the main complaints I had. Their version only works on specific devices that Tidal is partnered with.
You’re talking about your PIT (place in time) of a file, and not the speakers following you around which I’m positive Spotify doesn’t do.
This is a simple feature that every platform offers, even the FOSS options. It’s not a “feature” of Spotify, it’s just something that every streaming platform does anymore.
Correct, I have to manually select which device to play from, but Spotify also remembers the current playlist when switching. Tidal doesn’t, device sessions are separate.
Spotify doesn’t remember the queue though, so shuffled playlists get reshuffled when switching devices. It causes repeats and it’s really annoying. Deezer has the best session management I’ve used. It remembers the whole queue.
I just want unlimited audiobook listening this 15 hours thing is bullshit. I nearly dropped spotify the second I got that notification out of spite.
But you didn’t drop them and therefore told them via your spending/usage that you’re ok with this 15 hour thing (i don’t use spotify so i don’t know what that is)
After 15 listening hours they let you finish the chapter then block listening until the next month and its a stupid amount of money to top up. Unfortunately I have all my music and podcasts tied to the base service and thats the only thing keeping me there. If I’m paying a monthly fee I feel entitled to unlimited anything.
If you’re that mad at them you should take differeng action. That’s how they learn. What they are learning from your current action is that you are okay with what they’re doing.
I switched to Spotube because none of the music apps even have most of the weird songs I listen too, but I still have spotify only for podcasts because there aren’t any platforms that have all the ones I listen too and I’m not looking into finding new ones.
I also don’t want to have 10 apps for 1 podcast each, the closest replacement would be YT music but in their infinite wisdom they combined accounts across videos and music, I don’t want to see followed music artists in my subscriptions on the video app and I’m not paying for 2 premium accounts to keep them separate.
Also apple podcast & music sounds like it might be enough, but I’m now switching to iOS only for podcasts, I like my sideloaded apps thank you.
Sorry I had to vent as this as been pissing me off for a long while.
If you’re on Android, I use AntennaPod for all my podcasts. It’s FOSS that pulls from all the various podcast sources; I have yet to run across a podcast I couldn’t add to my rotation
If you’re ever looking to cut out Spotify completely, maybe see if that fits what you need.
Its been a few days of using the app and honestly I’m loving it a lot more than Spotifys UI, only downside is no good way discover new podcasts similar to what I like but honestly that’s an easy internet search, so I guess there are no downsides that I can’t easily fix.
Glad you like it! Yeah, I wish there was some way to easily discover new ones, but that would take some kind of per-user assessment and a category system for the various podcasts, so I understand why they don’t have it! Probably beyond the scope of what is essentially a volunteer project.
Thanks for the suggestion, will check it out
That explains a lot. I looked at the wrap and the “podcast” and they reported different top songs. The podcast was actually closer to what I expected than my actual list.
It definitely sucked this year. The stats were just boring and not as extensive. One thing I found weird was that after watching my wrapped, I got an alert to check out my stats. But the alert gave me a stat that was interesting, but it wasn’t included in my wrapped. It’s almost like Spotify forgot to include all the stats in the wrapped that it meant to.
