Think Your Spotify Wrapped Was Inaccurate This Year? This Could Be Why

People online think their Wrapped was a bit mid this year 🎵

Happy Spotify Wrapped day to all who celebrate!

If you were chronically online awaiting your Spotify Wrapped, same. There’s something fun about seeing all our data compiled in fun, colourful slides.

But if you’re looking at your results and thinking they might be a little bit off, you wouldn’t be the only one.

A bunch of people think their results aren’t accurate and that Spotify Wrapped as a whole hasn’t been as good as previous years.

If you’re wondering why some people are saying their Spotify Wrapped is inaccurate it’s because they are comparing them to their statsforspotify statistics,  a website which measures Spotify plays.

However, it’s worth noting Spotify Wrapped is calculated from a user’s listening experience from January to mid-November. While statsforspotify is the year-to-date.

It’s also important to note, we won’t actually know for sure if Wrapped is inaccurate or not. It’s all hear-say at this point.

But this writer did a bit of investigating and pinpointed one reason why your Wrapped might look a bit different this year.

Spotify issued mass layoffs.

Unfortunately, at the end of 2023, Spotify laid off 17 per cent of their staff which was approximately 1500 employees.

CEO Daniel Ek said at the time in a letter to staff, “economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities.”

Obviously we’re not sure whether or not this is the reason others thought their Spotify Wrapped was so mid this year, but it’s certainly what a lot of people online think.

One “data alchemist” in particular was laid off.

This is where it gets interesting. One of the people laid off last year was someone named Glenn McDonald.

He was responsible of extracting insights from music data and hired at Spotify to be a data alchemist and worked on algorithms, listening behaviours and more.

During his time at Spotify he managed to compile all his data into millions of tracks into a website called Every Noise At Once.

And according to an interview Glenn did with Billboard earlier this year, a lot of this research went into Spotify Wrapped.  

Maybe this is why we missed out on listening horoscopes, music cities and listening auras this year.

We feel like it’s also worth noting at this point that while Spotify had been providing personalised data of our yearly listening since 2016 it was actually an intern, Jewel Ham who came up with turning it into Wrapped.

There’s always next year.

Will all this alleged inaccuracy mean we won’t tune in for Wrapped in 2025? Absolutely not, we’re suckers for a pretty presentation of data insights in our lives. 

But hopefully the streaming giant can level up Wrapped next year.