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.
The podcast version of Spotify’s annual personalized report represents the company’s commitment to establishing itself as the leading destination for the long-form audio medium. The company says that since 2019, when the platform added podcasts to its streaming library, half a billion people have listened to a podcast on Spotify. And in the past year, the music streaming giant continued to build out its podcast-related offerings by giving users the ability to comment below podcast episodes and by providing tools for podcasters to track and grow their audience.
This Wrapped feature will likely be many users’ introduction to the AI-generated podcast, which is not nearly as prevalent as other manifestations of generative AI. With this rollout, those users will hear for the first time the ability of AI-generated dialog to sound strikingly similar to a human-to-human conversation. It may also be a distressing listen for Spotify’s growing roster of podcast creators, who may see the promotion of Wrapped’s AI hosts as conflicting with their own efforts.
Not coincidentally, Spotify Wrapped lands one day after Apple Music’s similar Replay report. While Apple Music users will get much of the same data on their listening habits as Spotify users get, they won’t get a team of two captivated AI podcast hosts breaking it all down for them. Maybe next year.
