It’s official, Spotify Wrapped is back from the brink. Last year, the streaming platform’s year-end data dump feature, where Spotify users are forced to contend with what music they actually listened to, was poorly received for its underwhelming data points and lackluster presentation. But, thankfully, the 2025 edition far outshines last year’s.
This year, Spotify Wrapped offered nearly a dozen new features that users online already can’t get enough of. From the return of Top Genres to the unique joy of Listening Age, Spotify made Wrapped exciting again.
People are loving — or at least getting a kick out of — being told how old they really are with Wrapped’s Listening Age feature. The special one-off feature examines release years from an individual’s most listened to songs and compares it with other users in the same age group to determine someone’s Listening Age. The result has been a wild mix of teenagers to octogenarians. The ages it calculated for celebrities like Charli XCX and Laufey were 75 and 85, respectively. Grimes got a whooping 92 years old.
Another special one-off was Clubs, which categorizes listeners into one of six clubs and is, essentially, based on vibes. “Your Club captures the emotional qualities of your year in music. That includes the moods, genres, and musical terms that defined what you listened to most,” a Spotify release reads. It’s kind of similar to 2024’s Music Evolution, but it seems a lot of thought was put into the description of each Club, which range from Archivist to Broadcaster.
Users online are also sharing the most in-depth files from their Listening Archive, a new revealing feature that sums up findings from a standout listening day. The feature is powered by AI, but that hasn’t stopped people from reveling in the information.
In addition to the 2025 specific features, Spotify also added fun new ways to present users’ Top Songs and Top Artists: The former is shared with a quiz where users guess their top song and the latter is delivered with a visual “race” of each artist. It also seems Spotify Wrapped listened to two major complaints from users following last year’s debacle: bring back Top Genres and give us Top Albums. They acquiesced on both.
The streaming platform is already seeing payoff from their efforts. Spotify saw 200 million engaged users and 500 million shares in the first 24 hours since Wrapped launched on Dec. 3. The influx marks a 19 percent increase from 2024 and marks Spotify Wrapped’s “biggest launch ever,” according to a press release from Spotify. In 2024, Spotify Wrapped didn’t reach the 200 million engaged users mark until 62 hours after the launch.
It’s a big win for Spotify, following a tough year of PR mishaps. Throughout 2025, users were notably more vocal online about potentially leaving the streaming platform and signing up for competitors like Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal instead. Some artists and organizations have even boycotted the platform. Organizations like Working Families and 50501 Movement launched protest campaign Spotify Unwrapped to condemn “the morally reprehensible actions of Spotify this year,” including “ICE Ads, promoting AI-generated music, and CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in an AI military defense company.”
In September, several bands and artists took their music off the streaming platform in anti-war protest after Spotify co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, became the chairman of Helsing, a German defense company. Later that month, Ek announced he was stepping down as Spotify’s CEO and would serve as the company’s executive chairman. That same month, Spotify announced that the platform would allow AI-powered bands and artists to use the service. In October, Rolling Stone reported that Spotify had received $74,000 from the Department of Homeland Security to run ICE recruitment and self-deportation advertisements.
