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spotify wrapped

New Jersey Democratic representative Josh Gottheimer might be a born and bred Jerseyite, but his recent Spotify Wrapped results seemed to put his allegiences to the Garden State in question.

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According to NJ.com, Gottheimer was one of the countless millions around the world who took part in Spotify’s annual Wrapped feature, allowing them to reflect on their listening habits across the last year. Fittingly, the results he shared showed he was a dedicated fan of New Jersey musical icon Bruce Springsteen.

“No surprises here… Fun fact: My first ever concert was at Meadowlands to see The Boss!” Gottheimer shared on social media, alongside an image which showed his top five songs of the year were Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”, “Because the Night”, “Glory Days”, “Badlands”, and “The Rising”.

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However, the New Jersey Monitor soon weighed in, pointing out some discrepencies between Gottheimer’s results and other Wrapped rundowns. Specifically, the font choice and spacing were singled out as points of contention, eventually being enough for it be deemed a fake.

“This would be my Spotify Wrapped if I didn’t share my account with my 12 and 15-year-old kids,” Gottheimer said in a statement when pressed for comment. “While it’s Springsteen all day for me — don’t get me wrong, I still love listening to Taylor Swift!”

Following the backlash, Gottheimer again took to social media to tamp down the low-level furore. “To paraphrase the Boss: I wasn’t here for business baby, I was only here for fun,” he wrote. “So just relax. This was a fun holiday tweet. It’s a joke to question my Springsteen creds, just ask my dog named Rosalita!”

“Let’s get back to what people do care about—lower taxes, lower costs!” he added.

Gottheimer later shared his real top five artists and songs, which noted that Springsteen was indeed his number one, followed closely by Billy Joel, Drake, Travis Scott, and Taylor Swift.

On the songs front, Springsteen’s 1975 track “She’s the One” hit the No. 3 spot, while the top spot belonged to Joel’s 2024 pop comeback “Turn the Lights Back On”. Gottheimer is, however, yet to respond to fellow New Jerseyans about his concession of the top spot to a New York artist.

If it seems like everybody is talking about Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s data-driven annual recap of listening habits, it’s because everybody is talking about Spotify Wrapped. That says a lot about its effectiveness and its value to the company.  
The streaming platform’s personalized year-end recap is unmissable this time of year. Mashable began prepping its readers back on Nov. 19. A week later, Spotify heightened expectations by advising users to update the Spotify app to the latest, Wrapped-ready version. When Wrapped finally appeared on Wednesday (Dec. 4), there was an onslaught of media coverage. Billboard even got into the Wrapped coverage, revealing Chappell Roan’s top artists and songs on Spotify in 2024 (Ariana Grande and Heart’s “Barracuda,” respectively).   

With so much media coverage, some of it is bound to carry a grousing, annoyed tone. “Hate your Spotify Wrapped?” Rolling Stone asked, “You’re not alone.” “Sorry, parents,” The Washington Post lamented, “it’s actually your kids’ Spotify Wrapped.” Vogue turned Wrapped into a frank self-examination in an article titled “I love Spotify Wrapped so much I hate it.” For people whose Spotify Wrapped “suck[ed],” Pocket-lint suggests ways to “fix it” in 2025. The Huffington Post’s compilation of the “funniest” tweets about Wrapped was filled with only mildly humorous complaints.  

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In contrast, articles about Wrapped’s peers came and went without anything close to the same level of media hullabaloo. The annual recaps of Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music received basic coverage at mostly tech-oriented publications but didn’t elicit the kind of longwinded pop culture essays that Wrapped conjures up every year. Apple Music Replay received run-of-the-mill articles such as “Apple Music’s yearly recap is finally available in the app” at tech news site The Verge. When TechCrunch covered the launch of Amazon Music’s 2024 Delivered, the headline referred to it as Amazon’s “take on Spotify Wrapped” lest nobody know what they were talking about. YouTube Music Recap launched on Nov. 25 to little media coverage.  

For its part, Spotify contributed to the media overload by building a 2024 Wrapped microsite and posting 10 Wrapped-related press releases on launch day. Wrapped itself introduced new innovations in 2024, including a personalized Wrapped podcast featuring two AI hosts and the Your Music Evolution Playlist, a personalized playlist that tracks a user’s different musical interests and phases throughout the year. Wrapped has become such an important event that Spotify hosted a pre-release press briefing that featured talks by executives across the company. As Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify software engineer and author of the book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changed Music, told Billboard via email, “nothing else they do gets as much marketing/branding energy put into it.”  

Wrapped especially shines in the awareness it attracts on social media. At the end of every Wrapped recap, Spotify offers personalized badges that flood X, Instagram and TikTok — the latter two benefitting from integrations announced in November that make it easier to share content. In this way, Wrapped turns its users into “active brand advocates on social media,” as one academic study put it. Or, as another paper phrased it, Spotify turns its users into “free labour” to help market its product. “For Spotify, it is 100% a brand-visibility moment,” says McDonald. “Social virality is the only metric the company cares about. The viral attention does help with user retention and reactivation, but the virality itself is the thing they’re measuring.”  

More than an effective marketing ploy, Wrapped has turned into a competitive advantage in a business where standalone music streaming services desperately need one. A company has a competitive advantage when it creates more economic value than its competitors. Economic value is the difference between the perceived value of the product and the costs required to produce the product. Some brands are able to charge a premium because they have succeeded, through the quality of the product and the effectiveness of marketing, in convincing consumers their product is worth more. Food made with better ingredients commands a price premium, for example. Sometimes differences in perception of value come down to marketing. The difference between luxury clothing brands’ prices can be explained by amounts spent on splashy advertisements and celebrity endorsements, not just the cost of materials and labor.   

Unlike streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services, which attract viewers mainly through exclusive programming, music streaming platforms have — for the most part — the same content and must find other avenues to attract and retain customers. Amazon Music Unlimited, for example, is cheaper for members of Amazon Prime. Apple Music benefits from being part of the Apple entertainment ecosystem and Apple’s ownership of music identification app Shazam. YouTube Music gets its subscribers through YouTube, the most popular streaming app in the world. Spotify, a standalone company, can’t match Amazon’s low price, Apple’s omnipresence or YouTube’s ubiquity.  

Instead, Spotify competes on product features it develops in-house. Launched in 2015, Discover Weekly, a personalized playlist filled with recently released tracks, was so popular that people who streamed their Discover Weekly playlists streamed twice as much as people who didn’t. A product that popular helps give Spotify an advantage over its larger competitors. Discover Weekly was launched the same year Apple launched Apple Music. Although many onlookers expected Apple would crush Spotify, Spotify has consistently maintained a sizable lead in market share, and innovation played an important role in holding off behemoths like Apple and Amazon. As Will Page, former Spotify chief economist, put it in his 2021 book Pivot, Discover Weekly “create[d] a moat to protect Spotify’s castle.”

Wrapped follows in Discover Weekly’s footsteps as a moat-building product innovation. The key is Spotify’s ability to get its listeners to talk about Wrapped. One study found that Spotify Wrapped was more effective than Apple Music Replay in users’ willingness to create user-generated content (i.e. share Wrapped on social media). That’s gold in a business where consumers can choose between a number of fairly identical substitutes with similar features. Anything that increases engagement and prevents users from leaving for Apple, Amazon or YouTube is valuable. In that sense, developing a product that becomes a part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Wrapped, is perhaps the biggest competitive advantage a streaming service can have.

Chappell Roan was on countless people’s 2024 Spotify Wrapped roundups, but who was on hers?
On Wednesday (Dec. 4), the 26-year-old pop star revealed which artists were in her top five at the close of the year, sharing an old photo of herself posing next to a car decked out in camo-print decals on Instagram and writing, “this pic kind of insane.”

“Ps,” she added. “My Spotify wrapped most listened to artists were 1. Ariana [Grande] 2. Charli [XCX] 3. Heart 4. Justice 5. Kacey Musgraves.”

“Top song was barracuda ofc,” Roan added, referencing her third-most-streamed artist’s 1977 hit.

The Missouri native’s post comes on the same day Spotify unveiled its annual Wrapped feature, allowing users to see which artists and songs they streamed the most over the course of 2024 through specially curated playlists and shareable data cards. The platform also revealed its most-streamed artists overall — Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish, in that order — as well as its most popular songs of the year.

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Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” garnered the most listens globally on Spotify this year, followed by Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” FloyyMenor and Cris Mj’s “Gata Only” and Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control.” In the U.S., however, Roan scored the sixth-most streamed song with breakthrough single “Good Luck, Babe!” — which surpassed one billion streams just a few days prior to Wrapped arriving — bested only by “Espresso,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” and Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” nationally.

The “Hot to Go” singer’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was also the fifth-most streamed album in the U.S. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology was No. 1 at home, followed by Wallen’s One Thing at a Time, Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet and Noah Kahan’s Stick Season.

Roan has previously expressed her fandom of Grande, calling herself an “Arianator” in an August livestream and adding that she was “so excited” to see Wicked. She also gave Charli a shout-out in her September Rolling Stone cover story, naming the “Von Dutch” artist as one of several female stars who had reached out to her with support during the emotional low-points of her rise to fame, along with Katy Perry, Lorde, Muna, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and more.

While everyone else is busy sharing their Spotify Wrapped lists on their socials this week, “Weird Al” Yankovic took some time on Wednesday (Nov. 29) in his Wrapped video to share a different story. “It’s my understanding that I had over 80 million streams on Spotify this year,” Yankovic said in his clip. “So, if […]

The end of November marks Spotify Wrapped season, the time of year when pretty much everyone is posting on social media about the artists and songs they listened to most this year. Wrapped has quickly become a beloved tradition among music lovers since since its launch in 2014. Not only does the year-end review give […]

Drake is just like music fans. After Spotify released its annual Wrapped campaign on Wednesday (Nov. 30), the Canadian MC is sharing who he’s been listening to this year.

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In an Instagram Story in the early morning hours of Dec. 1, Drake revealed that his top artist is another hip-hop star — and it was none other than the late Tupac Shakur. According to the “Jimmy Cooks” artist’s post, he listened to 2Pac for 246 minutes, putting him in the top 7 percent of Pac listeners in 2022.

That Shakur would be Drake’s most listened to artist this year isn’t a huge surprise. Drake has always sung the late artist’s praises in and out of the studio. “If there was anybody that I wish I could be a little more like, it’d probably be ‘Pac,” he said in a 2011 Boombox article.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Drake has previously sung Shakur praises in and out of the studio. “If there was anybody that I wish I could be a little more like, it’d probably be ‘Pac,” Drake told Boombox in 2011. “I think more than anything, aside from his music, which was absolutely incredible, I think he just drove people with who he was, the way he carried himself. He was somebody who was a free spirit and he did not care, he just did what he felt. I wish I could have a little more ‘Pac to my persona. I’m working on it.”

In 2017, the OVO Sound CEO referenced Pac again on the “Bring It Back” track with Trouble and Mike Will Made-It. “Do it for the six because we started there/ I got a girl that used to ride around with ‘Pac an’ them.”

Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign, which launched in December 2016, allows the music streamer’s users to view data about their activity on the platform over the past year, and then share it on social media.

It’s been nearly two years since Olivia Rodrigo dropped her debut album Sour, and now her army of fans has reason to suspect new music is finally on the way from their queen.

The speculation arose Wednesday (Nov. 30) when the singer sent a special video message to her top fans as part of this year’s Spotify Wrapped. “Hey, it’s Olivia! I just wanted to say thank you so much for listening to my music this year,” she said in the fan-captured clip. “I really, truly couldn’t be more grateful and I’m so excited for next year, and all of the new things and new music that 2023 will bring. So I’m sending so much love your way and thank you again! Bye!”

Rodrigo’s first album shot to No. 1 all over the world upon its May 2021 release and contained the smash singles “Drivers License,” “Deja Vu,” “Good 4 U,” “Brutal” and “Traitor,” as well as fan-favorite cuts like “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back,” “Happier” and “Jealousy, Jealousy.”

Plenty has happened in the Disney star’s life since she unveiled Sour, though. She’s embarked on her first headlining tour across North America and Europe, starred in season 3 of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and premiered both her concert film Sour Prom and Disney+ documentary Driving Home 2 U (A Sour Film). Oh, and she also picked up her first trio of Grammy Awards at the 2022 ceremony for best new artist, best pop vocal album and best pop solo performance.

Most recently, Rodrigo honored Carly Simon with a performance of “You’re So Vain” at the ’70s icon’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2022 and interviewed former co-star Jenna Ortega about her starring role in Netflix’s Wednesday.

Watch Rodrigo hint at new music to her Spotify Wrapped fans below.

‘Tis the season for Spotify Wrapped, a.k.a. the day of the year where you find out your music listening habits of 2022.
On Wednesday (Nov. 30) the streaming service unveiled its annual colorful, Instagrammable package in which it calculates all your personal data to serve up a custom accounting of your top artists, songs and playlists from the past year.

While Spotify Wrapped is available for anyone with an account, sometimes it can be hard to find. Don’t worry, though, Billboard‘s got your back. Like last year, the 2022 Spotify Wrapped is only accessible on the Spotify mobile app. So if you go to spotify.com/wrapped like usual, you’ll be directed to download the app.

Once you’ve logged in on mobile, your personalized look back at 2022 should appear right on the home screen with the message “Your 2022 Wrapped is here” beneath your six most recent listens. This year’s version also chronicles how users listening habits have changed throughout the day, breaking down what kind of music you stream over the course of the morning, noon and night via the “Audio Day” feature.

The latest Wrapped wrinkle is the “music personality” feature, a kind of Myers-Briggs-style personality test using four-letter codes that breaks down how you listen to music while assigning you one of 16 categories, including “Specialist,” “The Replayer,” “Early Adopter,” “Voyager,” “Adventurer” or “Fanclubber,” with each Personality getting its own colorful card perfect for sharing on socials. Spotify is also including messages from artists including Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, in which they thank fans for listening to their music enough to get them in the Wrapped mix.

In addition to the annual rundown, this year’s Wrapped includes a creator experience for podcasters and artists. And Artist Wrapped, now in its sixth year, rolls out with several new features including “Your Artist Messages,” a dedicated Wrapped video feed, personalized to each listener; and a “Spotlight” on merchandise and ticketing which, for the first time, sees personalized offerings integrated into the Wrapped Hub and promoted to top fans via in-app notifications and other channels.

Click the icon and you’ll be guided through a fun journey revisiting all your favorite music that soundtracked your 2022.

Spotify has been prepping music fans for their personalized Spotify Wrapped playlist for weeks, and the end of year rollout appears to be right around the corner.

The teases started way back in mid-October, when the streaming giant tweeted, “We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions,” garnering responses from fans eager to guess the artist they had streamed the most throughout the bulk of 2022. (One week later, Spotify launched its new ‘Your Wrapped Soundcheck’ feature for artists on the platform.)

In years past, Spotify has collected data regarding each user’s listening habits through Halloween (Oct. 31) with Wrapped dropping either Dec. 1 or 2 — which in 2022, would mean this Thursday or Friday. And while the company has yet to confirm an exact date for the 2022 iteration of the madness, they’ve ramped up anticipation for the big day since that first tweet.

On Nov. 22, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Spotify promised, “All will be revealed soon” when it came to Spotify Wrapped. One day later, they roped Lizzo into the conversation by posting a gif of the singer beneath another tweet which read, “Turn up the music… it’s almost about damn time for #SpotifyWrapped” — a point-blank reference to her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, and lead single off 2022’s Special.

On Sunday night (Nov. 27), the streamer sent out the latest alert to anxious fans, tweeting, “Want to be the first to know when #SpotifyWrapped is here? [Heart] this tweet and we’ll remind you!” Based on hints and history, it seems the annual drop of Spotify Wrapped is imminent.

Check out everything Spotify has shared about the latest Spotify Wrapped below.

We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions 👇— Spotify (@Spotify) October 12, 2022

This year, Spotify is making the streamer’s annual year-end Wrapped campaign more artist-friendly.

Called Your Wrapped Soundcheck, the new feature, available via Spotify for Artists, will allow artists to upload videos thanking their biggest fans for a great year on Spotify, list their latest merch and ensure tickets for their upcoming shows are available on the platform. These videos and offers will then be promoted to top fans as a part of their Wrapped experience.

By uploading short, video messages of 30 seconds or less to their Spotify for Artists profiles, artists can let fans know what their support meant to them over the past year, tease what they’re working on next and/or tell a story that defined their year. Artists are encouraged to list merch on Shopify (the e-commerce giant that partnered with Spotify last October), and provide information regarding their upcoming concert dates on one of Spotify’s partner sites, plus set up a Fan Support account to collect end-of-year tips or drive donations to a charitable cause.

Artists are encouraged to prepare their profiles ahead of this year’s Wrapped season. Your Wrapped Soundcheck’s website provides step-by-step instructions to help artists get ready for the big day.