A former Spotify engineer explains why Wrapped 2024 has been a complete disappointment

Glenn McDonald, former engineer at Spotify and a key figure in the creation of its famous Wrapped for over a decade, has quickly joined the chorus of criticism towards the 2024 edition of the famous annual music summary. Laid off from the company in 2023 during a 25% staff reduction, McDonald told Business Insider that this year the Wrapped lacked context and humanity: “It didn’t connect my listening with communities or the world, it simply treated each listener as if they were alone.”

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Users did not hold back in expressing their disappointment. “Spotify Wrapped failed so spectacularly this year… Where are the musical cities, the playlists, the main genres, or the listening auras? All that time waiting for WHAT?” wrote a user on Twitter. Even Sydney Brown, a loyal follower of the platform, declared to The New York Times that this edition seemed “like a class assignment turned in late.” Although the company claimed that Wrapped 2024 has been their best year so far, the criticisms point to a lack of key elements that made previous editions popular.

McDonald attributed part of the issue to a shift in focus towards artificial intelligence tools. This year, Wrapped offered an AI-generated podcast that described users’ musical habits, leaving behind the cultural comparisons and musical genre narratives that used to be the soul of this experience. “Spotify always treated Wrapped as a marketing exercise, but sometimes you have to make an effort to infuse humanity into something like this,” noted McDonald, who now works at an AI startup.

From their perspective, the mass layoffs also affected the creativity of the remaining team. “I’m not surprised that someone might think: ‘Maybe I won’t stick my neck out this year,'” they added. For its part, Spotify has defended the use of AI and highlighted a 26% increase in first-day interactions compared to 2023, although it acknowledged that the features of Wrapped change every year.

Now, the debate is on: can Spotify recover the community and cultural essence of Wrapped without abandoning its commitment to technology? In any case, the company would do well to take note for future years, at the risk of devaluing one of its most popular features.

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