Everyone’s favorite annual music compilation is almost here, and Spotify Wrapped 2025 lands in just a few weeks, but there’s one burning question everyone’s asking: will it be better than last year?
After the major debacle that was Spotify Wrapped 2024, the one thing subscribers, including myself, are hoping and praying for is that the top music streaming service has learned from last year’s mistakes.
Back during its Open House event in July, Spotify admitted that they made mistakes with your Wrapped 2024, which was mainly inaccurate data on Spotify’s part. That said, Spotify then revealed its plans to improve this year’s music roundup — but we loyal subscribers will be the judges of that when Spotify Wrapped 2025 drops.
With only a few weeks left before it undoubtedly takes the internet by storm again, there are three things in particular that I think Spotify need to be aware of when they roll out this year’s Wrapped to avoid a repeat of last year’s flop.
1. Less AI, more innovation
It’s asking a lot from a platform that glorifies its AI tools, but last year’s Spotify Wrapped was far too focused on collecting personal streaming data using generative AI features, mainly the AI podcast.
While last year’s AI podcast was an interesting shift for Spotify and the way it presented your Wrapped data, it was still pretty surface level and was nothing more than a brief summary of your year in music. It didn’t necessarily tell us anything new that wasn’t part of the wider Wrapped roundup; instead, we went without fun and innovative features like Sound Town and its Myers Briggs-style 2023 listening personalities.
2. A feature worthy of breaking the internet
One of the best parts about Spotify Wrapped is that there’s always a new feature that easily lends itself to internet memes that manage to break the internet every time thanks to social media shares. In 2023 we were blessed with two: Sound Town and Me in 2023. Last year we had none of that.
To say it was a missed opportunity on Spotify’s part is an understatement because of how hard Sound Town emerged across TikTok and Instagram, so the fact that Spotify decided not to follow suit with a trend-worthy feature on social media last year is baffling.
Let’s hope Spotify has learned its lesson.
3. Bring back personal insight
As mentioned, Spotify’s focus on AI compromised many things, but it was personal insights that were missed the most.
Instead of presenting the most streamed albums of the year or listing your top five genres, all these metrics were sacrificed for the AI podcast overview, but also a ‘revamped’ version of AI DJ. Additionally, there was no feature that told you what type of listener you were or how your listening habits changed over the year. Bringing these back is the bare minimum for Spotify to redeem itself after last year’s Wrapped rollout, but there are other unique insights it could do with highlighting.
For example, Spotify could recap your year of listening with a unique Daylist-style playlist with an unhinged title and new music recommendations to help you kickstart your 2026 – as opposed to compiling the year’s most streamed songs into a playlist you probably won’t use.
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