Spotify Wrapped is animated annual summary of your listening habits, all at once darling i insulted– he’s back again. But in 2024, the striking visuals will be accompanied by a new audio supplement created with artificial intelligence.
As of today, Spotify Users will now have the opportunity to listen to their annual report as a personalized podcast based on artificial intelligence, in which two synthetic hosts enthusiastically discuss the user’s most played songs and favorite artists.
The new podcast summary is powered by Google’s NotebookLM. If you used Google’s AI tool generate an audio podcast on a topic you’re researching, the two AI-generated voices on the Wrapped podcast will sound familiar. The voices, which Spotify refers to as “AI hosts,” will engage in a short conversation about you and your listening patterns in 2024. The feature will launch in English in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Spotify’s home country of Sweden. And just like the long-running visual iteration of Wrapped, the AI podcast will be easily shareable.
The podcast is fully personalized. Both hosts address users by name and speak in the second person. In addition to providing you with specific facts (such as your top artist and the total number of minutes you listened), hosts will analyze the data Spotify has collected about you. They’ll flatter you, tell me I’m a “taster” and call 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 Rental soundtrack in the shower. They expressed curiosity about my life, and at one point wondered what I was doing on January 9th, the day I listened to more minutes of music than any other day in 2024.
This isn’t the first time Spotify has incorporated an AI-powered voice into the Wrapped experience. Last year, the platform’s resident DJ AI, called DJ X, was included as a Wrapped add-on, which provided feedback on users’ listening habits in 2023. This year, Spotify expanded this feature to serve to Spanish speakers, indicating that the company sees a future in AI-generated audio.
This AI-enhanced version of Wrapped comes at a time when users are expressing concerns about Big Tech’s surveillance of their behavior and rampant data collection. Spotify, in particular, has faced criticism for rebranding its precise tracking of user activity as a cozy, shareable holiday gift. Listeners have also been slow to embrace AI-generated podcasts, which often feature cloying virtual hosts who seem strange in their attempts to sound human.
