Spotify Wrapped Animation The annual roundup of your listening habits, loved and reviled at the same time, is back. But in 2024, the striking images will be accompanied by a new audio complement made with artificial intelligence.
Starting today, Spotify users will have the opportunity to listen to their annual report as a personalized AI-powered podcast, in which two synthetic hosts enthusiastically discuss the user’s most played tracks and favorite artists.
The new podcast summary is powered by Google’s NotebookLM. If you’ve used Google’s AI tool to generate an audio podcast on a topic you’re researching, then the two AI-generated voices in the Wrapped podcast will look familiar. The voices, which Spotify refers to as “AI hosts,” will engage in a brief conversation about you and your listening patterns in 2024. The feature will roll out in English in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Sweden, Spotify’s country of origin. And like the long-running visual iteration of Wrapped, the AI podcast will be easily shareable.
The podcast is completely personalized. The two hosts address users by name and speak in the second person. In addition to giving you hard data (like your top artist and the total number of minutes you spent listening), the presenters will analyze the data that Spotify has collected about you. They’ll flatter you: They told me I’m a “trendsetter” and called my musical taste “so diverse” and “so unique.” They will extrapolate details of your lifestyle based on your listening habits. For example, they told me they could imagine me strutting down the street in pink Pilates clothes to Chappel Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” and assumed I was singing along to the song. Rent soundtrack while you’re in the shower. They expressed curiosity about my life, and at one point wondered what I was doing on January 9, the day I listened to more minutes of music than any other day in 2024.
This isn’t the first time Spotify has incorporated AI-powered voice into the Wrapped experience. Last year, the platform’s resident AI DJ, called DJ indicating that the company sees a future in AI-generated audio.
This AI-enhanced version of Wrapped comes at a time when users are raising concerns about Big Tech’s surveillance of their behavior and rampant data collection. Spotify, in particular, has faced criticism for rebranding its precise user activity tracking as a cozy, shareable holiday gift. Listeners have also been slow to embrace AI-generated podcasts, which typically feature cloying virtual hosts who seem unsettling in their attempts to appear human.