Its that week again. Everyone I follow on every platform is posting screenshots of pink and green gradient cards telling them who their top artist was, and this year mine has a twist I wasnt expecting: the whole thing got narrated at me.
If you havent used it, Spotifys AI DJ (the feature theyve had rolling out since earlier this year, voiced by that guy Xavier "X" Jernigan, or at least a very convincing model of him) decided to horn in on Wrapped this year. Instead of just swiping through slides in silence like Ive done every December since 2016, I got a chipper synthetic voice telling me Id spent 61,000-something minutes listening this year and that my top genre was apparently "bedroom pop," which, fine, accurate, but hearing a computer say it back to me with fake enthusiasm made me feel kind of exposed. Its one thing to see a stat on a card. Its another thing to have a voice that sounds like a guy who definitely goes to Coachella tell you that you listened to the same Beach House song 340 times.
My actual top artist this year was Boygenius, which I could have told you in August honestly, no surprise there. Top song was "Not Strong Enough," also unsurprising, I put it on basically every time I did dishes. What did surprise me was the new "Sound Town" thing they added, which matches your listening habits to a city somewhere in the world. Mine said Reykjavik. Ive never been to Iceland. I dont know what in my listening history screams "Reykjavik" to an algorithm but Im choosing to take it as a compliment.
Heres my actual complaint though, and its a small one but it bugs me every year: Wrapped keeps getting more elaborate and somehow less useful. Back in like 2018 it was just a clean page, top 5 songs, top 5 artists, total minutes, done in ten seconds. Now its a whole interactive experience with an AI DJ and a "Sound Town" and I think last year there was some kind of audio aura thing too. I get why they do it, its a marketing moment, everyone reposts it, its basically the one week a year Spotify gets to dominate every feed on earth for free. But as an actual data nerd I just want my top 100 songs in a spreadsheet and Wrapped buries the good stuff under animations now. I ended up going and pulling my own stats from a third party site because the official version doesnt even show you a full top 100 anymore unless you dig for it.
Small tangent, but this is also the same week Google finally shipped Gemini, the big multi-model thing theyve been teasing for what feels like a year, with the demo videos and the claims about beating GPT-4 on a bunch of benchmarks. Im not going to pretend I have a hot take on it yet because I havent touched it, and honestly the demo video going around already got some pushback for maybe being edited in a way thats more impressive than the real thing would be live. Ill believe the benchmark claims when I can actually poke at it myself instead of watching a produced video about it. But its funny that this is the same week as Wrapped, because both things are, in their own way, a company packaging up a year (or a model) of raw data into a shiny presentation designed to make you go "wow" and repost it. One of them is just lower stakes than the other.
Anyway. If your Sound Town also came back somewhere weird, or if the AI DJ voice creeped you out reading your own stats back to you, Id genuinely like to hear about it. Ive got three tabs open right now comparing my Wrapped screenshot to last years and I cant tell if my music taste actually calmed down or if I just listened to fewer new things this year. Possibly both. Possibly Im just getting older and thats what happens to your Spotify Wrapped, it starts looking suspiciously stable.