Spotify Wrapped and its many dupes sucked this year on just about every platform — except Strava.
Spotify was the first company to take all of the data we gave it throughout the year, neatly package it into a shareable format, and give us a Wrapped that we all actually enjoyed. It started a phenomena of Wrappeds, which seemed to peak this year which such hits as "Asana Wrapped" and Vanguard retirement account Wrapped. But we owe all good Wrappeds to Spotify's impact.
Unfortunately, those are all the compliments I can give Spotify this year. Wrapped 2024 was a disappointment. We didn't get genres, potentially thanks to Spotify laying off key data scientists this year, and it was way too much AI and not enough real creativity. As one Reddit user wrote, "This year's wrap is what happens when you replace creatives with AI."
"Past years had fun, unique ideas, like telling you what city your listening habits were most similar to or giving you an MBTI-like listening type. This year we don’t have any of that, just a bunch of AI 'features' that aren't very good. They didn’t even do as well with basic stats — where are my top 5 genres or the number of genres I listened to? And the graphics are incredibly uninspiring," another user wrote on Reddit. "I don’t want AI, I want something creative."
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Spotify Wrapped was so bad that it has people considering moving to Apple Music, even though that Wrapped was pretty boring, too. But there was less AI, it was less annoying, and, frankly, there's less hype about it — so it's not quite as disappointing when it doesn't hit.
Earlier this week, we got another Wrapped people were looking forward to and then, immediately, disappointed by: Goodreads Wrapped. It was designed by what I have to assume was a raccoon wading through peanut butter to click the wrong buttons on the most boring Canva template to ever exist. Just look at this:
The images aren't built in the dimensions necessary to share on social media, which kind of defeats the purpose of designing a social-forward Wrapped. It was at least expected — all Goodreads does is disappoint its users. We're still waiting on Wrappeds from other book tracking apps like Fable and StoryGraph, which tend to have more interesting visuals, so hope is still alive for the readers in the chat.
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By my estimation, there was just one Wrapped that didn't disappoint: Strava Wrapped, also called Year in Sport. It has everything you want: Interesting visuals, fun takeaways like who likes your posts the most, your top sports, your total time working out, your total days active, your total distance and elevation, and more. It was good because it was simple and data focused. There was not a lot of AI junk or weird, useless millennial-coded drivel a la Spotify's Pink Pilates Princess. Nearly every single post on X or Reddit about Year in Sport is some version of "forget your Spotify Wrapped, Year in Sport was actually good."
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There's an argument to be made that we use these apps to better ourselves with our own data. Spotify and Goodreads show us how our music and book taste might lack diversity, which could encourage us to listen and read differently. Strava shows us how much work we actually put into our fitness this year. But, more realistically, these apps make living performative and competitive, ultimately watering down the reason we actually enjoy reading, running, or listening to music.
To that end: Wrappeds are intended to be shared. Maybe you are more evolved, and you post your Wrapped on social media without the need for validation. Maybe you don't imagine anyone responding, "Wow, you have incredible taste and your dedication to bettering yourself makes you definitively better than everyone else." Not me, though.
I would love to be evolved enough to say that I read, run, and listen to music purely for the beauty of art and love of the game. Unfortunately, like seemingly everyone else online, I'm a hungry little rat scouring my tiny world for as much attention as I can possibly gorge myself on. And I was given nothing to eat.
