Spotify Wrapped animation the annual roundup of your listening habits – both loved and hated – is back. However, in 2024, the striking graphics will be accompanied by a completely novel audio addition created using artificial intelligence.
Starting today, Spotify users will be able to listen to their annual report in the form of a personalized AI-powered podcast, in which two synthetic hosts enthusiastically discuss users’ most-streamed songs and favorite artists.
The novel podcast summary is powered by the Google NotebookLM app. If you used Google’s AI tool to generate an audio podcast on the topic you’re looking for, the two AI-generated voices in the Wrapped podcast will sound familiar. The voices that Spotify calls “AI hosts” will conduct a compact conversation about you and your listening patterns in 2024. The feature will be available in English in the US, UK, Australia, Modern Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Sweden, the home of Spotify. And like the long-running visual version of Wrapped, the AI podcast will be easily shareable.
The podcast is fully personalized. Both hosts address users by name and speak in the second person. In addition to giving you tough facts (like your top artist and total minutes spent listening), hosts will analyze the data Spotify has collected about you. They flatter you – they told me I was a “tastemaker” and called my music taste “so diverse” and “so unique.” They extrapolate details of your lifestyle from your listening habits. For example, they told me they imagined me strutting down the street in a pink Pilates outfit listening to Chappel Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” and assumed I was singing along Rent shower soundtrack. 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 in 2024.
This isn’t the first time Spotify has incorporated AI-powered voice into Wrapped. Last year, the platform’s resident DJ sound generated by artificial intelligence.
This AI-powered version of Wrapped comes at a time when users are raising concerns about Gigantic 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 accessible holiday gift. Listeners are also reluctant to listen to AI-generated podcasts, which typically feature off-putting virtual hosts who appear weird while trying to sound human.