AI is the reason Spotify Wrapped feels different this year

Spotify has deployed artificial intelligence for its year-end Wrapped feature, generating custom playlist suggestions and ‘podcasts’ powered by Google’s NotebookLM technology.

Those prominent features suggest Spotify is unafraid to expand its use of AI-generated audio, despite human creativity generating the music, audiobooks, and podcasts that drive its subscriptions.

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Wrapped — which shows users of the music streaming app who they listened to, their favourite songs, and other listening data over the year — launched overnight in Australia.

The feature is drawn from each user’s own listening habits, with Spotify’s algorithms collating a huge amount of personal data to create custom visualisations and playlists.

But for the first time, Spotify has explicitly advertised its use of artificial intelligence across the Wrapped experience.

Most prominent is its bespoke ‘podcast’ summarising each user’s streaming habits, using voices generated by Google’s NotebookLM system.

While technically impressive, its “two dynamic AI podcast hosts” offer surface-level insights into each user’s music habits.

In a separate statement, Janakitti Ratana-Rueangsri, associate product manager at Google Labs, said some hiccups may appear in a feature that “transforms static information into lively audio conversations”.

“Keep in mind, our AI hosts may occasionally mispronounce words and don’t always provide a comprehensive overview, but we hope you enjoy this first-ever personalised podcast for your year in music,” he said.

Spotify subscribers can also access AI-generated playlists through Wrapped, which uses text prompts to generate miniature mixtapes.

The platform first introduced AI-generated playlists as a beta feature in April.

And the Spotify DJ service — its first major foray into AI-powered voiceovers — also appears in Wrapped, detailing listening statistics to subscribers.

Elsewhere, some Spotify users are poking fun at the nebulous genre descriptions presented in their Wrapped summaries.

Music lovers seeking more ‘traditional’ listening statistics can still access services like last.fm.

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