Spotify Wrapped’s animated yearly recap of your listening habits—at once beloved and reviled—is back again. But in 2024, the flashy visuals will be accompanied by a brand-new audio add-on crafted with artificial intelligence.
Starting today, Spotify users will now get the chance to listen to their annual report as a personalized, AI-powered podcast, in which two synthetic hosts discuss the user’s most-played tracks and favorite artists with enthusiasm.
The new podcast recap is powered by Google’s NotebookLM. If you’ve used Google’s AI tool to generate an audio podcast about a topic you’re researching, then the two AI-generated voices in the Wrapped podcast will sound familiar. The voices, which Spotify refers to as “AI hosts,” will engage in a brief conversation about you and your 2024 listening patterns. The feature will roll out in English in the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Spotify’s home country of Sweden. And just like the long-standing visual iteration of Wrapped, the AI podcast will be easily shareable.
The podcast is fully personalized. The two hosts address users by name and speak in the second person. In addition to providing you with hard facts (like your top artist and total number of minutes you spent listening), the hosts will analyze the data Spotify has collected about you. They’ll flatter you—they told me I’m a “tastemaker,” and called my music taste “so diverse” and “so unique.” They’ll extrapolate details of your lifestyle based on your listening habits. For example, they told me they could picture me strutting down the street in pink pilates gear to Chappel Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” and presumed that I sang along to the Rent soundtrack while in the shower. They expressed curiosity about my life, at one point wondering what I was up to on January 9, the day I listened to more minutes of music than any other day of 2024.
This isn’t Spotify’s first time incorporating an AI-powered voice into the Wrapped experience. Last year, the platform’s resident AI DJ, called DJ X, was included as a Wrapped add-on, providing commentary on users’ 2023 listening habits. This year, Spotify expanded this feature to serve Spanish speakers, indicating the company sees a future in AI-generated audio.
This AI-enhanced version of Wrapped arrives 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 and sharable holiday gift. Listeners have also been slow to embrace AI-generated podcasts, which typically feature cloying virtual hosts that seem eerie in their attempts to sound human.
