Why does Spotify Wrapped 2024 suck? Internet blames last year's layoffs

Spotify Wrapped 2024 has finally landed, and it’s safe to say that people aren’t satisfied with it. From missing content like top genres to top albums, there are so many things missing from this year.

The Internet quickly blamed Spotify’s decision last year to cut off roughly 1,500 jobs, with some (not mainly or all) from the UX writers and researchers department, as the black sheep.

That was about 17% of its total workforce, which CEO Daniel Ek attributed to the slowed economic growth and rising capital costs. It marked Spotify’s third round of layoffs in 2023, following job cuts in the podcast unit and earlier that year. Ironically, the layoffs also arrived just in time as Spotify Wrapped 2023 launched.

And that, to some extent, is true. AI does influence Spotify Wrapped a lot this year. Google’s AI-powered NotebookLM now arrives on Wrapped as an AI podcast curator, so in some countries, you could even hear these AI podcasters talk about your journey in music in 2024. It feels a bit soul-less, too.

A quick Google or Reddit search could now show you why Spotify Wrapped sucks this year. Genre rankings and city pairings were missing, and there was a huge increased reliance on AI for curating playlists and podcasts, too. And that’s not the last of it.

This year’s visual design also seems bland and repetitive compared to last year, and some even report hallucinatory artist and song data—which, if you’re familiar with AI, you’d know that AI tends to hallucinate sometimes and make things up for the sake of generating answers.

Ouch.