Spotify wraps 2024 with a bunch of Taylor Swift, a bit of AI

Happy “Spotify Feeds Your Data Back To You” Day! Spotify Wrapped 2024 is here, slightly later than it was in previous years, but more or less the same as it’s ever been. As always, the end-of-year feature will tell you your most listened to songs and artists. This year, it will also track your “musical evolution”—for instance, in March, this writer was in her “Wanderlust Actor Indie Folk phase,” while in June, it was a “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop season,” whatever that means. 

Another new feature this year is a personalized “Wrapped AI Podcast,” which is a partnership with Google to promote its notetaking tool NotebookLM. The Wrapped AI Podcast features two artificial intelligence hosts summarizing your listening data. Apparently this was done because Spotify is “always looking to be where our users are listening” (according to a Spotify exec, via The Verge). Why you’d need two fake people to summarize your data when the Wrapped feature already did it for you is still unclear, but it wouldn’t be 2024 without slapping some useless AI nonsense on top of something that already works.

Beyond the individual Spotify Wrapped 2024, the company also released overall listening data for the U.S. and the world. The platform’s top streamed artist of 2024 was, unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift, with more than 26.6 billion streams globally. Swift’s latest release, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology was the most streamed album in the world. (With 31 tracks, you can see how she racked up so many minutes.) Swift was followed by The Weeknd and Bad Bunny as the top three most streamed artists in the world, with Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard And Soft and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet rounding out the top three albums. Carpenter’s “Espresso” was the most streamed song in the world, followed by “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone and “Birds Of A Feather” by Eilish. You can check out the full top 10 lists here.

Spotify Wrapped has become a fun tradition, but of course it’s not the only music streaming platform celebrating the end of the year. Over at Apple Music, Taylor Swift and her Tortured Poets Department was also the top streamed artist and album of the year. (Swift was the top Apple and Spotify artist of 2023, as well.) The top streamed song on Apple Music was Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which, interestingly, did not crack Spotify’s global top 10 list (it placed second on the platform’s U.S. top 10 songs streamed, however). According to Billboard, Boone’s “Beautiful Things” topped the 2024 Global Shazam chart. See you next year!