By: Karl Salkowski

On the morning of December 3rd, hundreds of millions of people opened their Spotify Wrapped, resulting in millions of shares and posts. But what is a Spotify Wrapped? And why are so many people embarrassed about it?

Every year since 2015 Spotify has released a personally curated selection of each user’s listening habits. The specific day it releases is always a mystery, but Spotify Wrapped day always lands sometime between the last week of November and the first week of December.

Since the beginning, Spotify has shown you your top artists and songs, but each year they add more and more new features and interesting statistics. The highlight of Wrapped 2024 was an AI personalized podcast discussing your listening habits, while in 2025 Spotify gave out estimated listening ages and had you guess who was your top artist of the year. Needless to say, each year Spotify adds new and inventive features to their yearly marketing campaign in order to make it more trendy and viral.

But the question still remains: Why are so many people embarrassed of what they listen to? It turns out that this is actually much more complicated than it seems. Spotify stops collecting data for Spotify Wrapped sometime between mid-October and early November. This means that everything you listened to in the last month to 6 weeks prior is not taken into account. Many people feel that their Wrapped feels weighted towards the beginning of the year, and this explains why. It’s natural that people’s music tastes evolve over time, which explains how these otherwise mundane statistics can actually be very interesting and surprising.

Over the years, as Spotify Wrapped becomes more and more viral, imitations become more and more common. End-of-the-year recaps have become common in an abundance of apps including Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube, and Duolingo.

Spotify Wrapped is a genius marketing campaign only becoming more popular and mainstream each year. End-of-year recaps across websites and apps will only become more and more common, but these recaps aren’t just silly and fun; they also raise important questions about personal data and how it’s stored and shared online.