Spotify Wrapped is officially here, and with it comes your very personal look back at how you put together the soundtrack to your year.
We know your year in review brings up all the feels, but maybe you’d like to know a little more about all the ways your listening and our lists come together. From the skilled team of music editors who help develop Wrapped to the cutting-edge engineers who evolve our tools to better suit your listening habits, it’s truly art and science working side by side .
We caught up JJ Italianhead of global music curation and discovery at Spotify, and Molly HolderSpotify’s Senior Director of Personalization, to reveal more about the magic behind Wrapped.
Happy launching of Wrapped to you both! First, how does our annual experience showcase the work of our brilliant technical team and the expertise of our editorial team?
JJ: The work of Spotify’s editorial experts is based on a deep understanding of music culture. We always work as a global team of music editors to identify and amplify trending songs, stories, and artists for the user and, most importantly, to contextualize these moments in curated playlists or other editorial offerings for helping users build a deep, lasting connection. to the song or artist.
Spotify Wrapped gives listeners the opportunity to look back at the artist and track the connections they’ve made over the year with their personalized Wrapped list, while exploring some of the songs and artists that helped define year in musical culture more broadly. our end-of-year Wrapped editorial playlists.
Molly: The beauty of Wrapped is that it reflects each individual user. Whether it’s your favorite song, total minutes listened to, or your favorite artist, 2024 Wrapped celebrates how You listened to this year.
We believe that great personalization fuels discovery: we power nearly 2 billion music discoveries every day, connecting listeners with artists and genres they might never have discovered otherwise.
In addition to the work JJ and his team have done, we’re excited to launch several new custom Wrapped features this year. From innovations like Your Music Evolution to the expansion of our AI-powered tools (like AI DJ, AI Playlist, and Wrapped AI Podcast), users will have even more ways to explore the songs that defined their year .
JJ, can you tell us more about how the work of Spotify’s editorial team influences what users discover throughout the year, culminating in what appears in their Wrapped?
JJ: Throughout the year, our editors around the world constantly monitor new music and cultural trends to identify important emerging tracks and artists. We examine a wide range of qualitative and quantitative signals, on and off platform, that inform our editorial decisions.
We also continually monitor playlist performance to understand which tracks and artists users are responding to. This helps signal which tracks should be added to more playlists. Your Wrapped can be made up of artists you discovered anywhere on Spotify, including our editorial surfaces.
Molly, based on that, how do Spotify’s algorithms use these editorial picks to improve personalized recommendations outside of Wrapped to ensure our users discover new music all year long?
Molly: Spotify’s personalization is all about giving you what you like while pushing you a little out of your comfort zone. We learn what you like based on how you interact with Spotify, and our personalization technology takes into account a number of signals that you, as users, provide. For example, when you add songs to a playlist, listen to an entire song, skip a song, or interact with an artist, it sends us clear signals that help us tailor our programming to your tastes.
But it’s also our job to determine when we need to introduce something new to you. This is when we consider some additional factors, such as signs of popularity and how other users interact with the songs. We also rely on our editorial team, who play a crucial role in the selection of playlists and, through their knowledge, intuition and expertise, contribute to the learning of our machines.
Recommendations are shaped by a number of signals, each contributing to the decision whether or not to suggest a lead to a user. Although these signals are weighted differently, listener satisfaction is always a priority and we only recommend music we think listeners will want to hear. For more information on the most important inputs that determine our personalization, you can read more here.
How does Spotify use both human curation and algorithms to combat recommendation repetitiveness?
Molly: Finding the right balance between familiarity and discovery is incredibly difficult. One reason is that music is different from other formats. On other platforms, you can consume content once and never return to it. On Spotify, you can listen to the same song dozens of times, so we know that a certain repetitiveness is good.
But we don’t just paint by numbers. We listen to our users and the descriptive way they say they would like to see us better balance familiarity with discovery, new with old, music with podcasts and audiobooks. We take this qualitative feedback to heart just as much as we evaluate quantitative signals when making decisions about changes to our algorithms.
Can you tell us how human expertise and algorithms worked together to propel a song or artist to success on Spotify?
JJ: One of the most compelling examples this year would be CharliIt is KID album and the associated cultural moment, “Brat Summer”. Our editors were able to listen to the album in advance and identified it as one of the best stories of the coming summer. As the album launch and cultural conversation accelerated and expanded into new avenues and trends, our editors worked to reflect each moment promptly and participate in the conversation holistically on all our editorial surfaces.
KID not fitting neatly into any given genre, we had the opportunity to expand our genre remit and work collaboratively to support it across multiple playlists and destinations on the platform. Not only did Charli grace the cover of our Friday new music playlist on the day the album was released, but also on the covers of hot girl walking, Party successAnd hyperpopwhich helped us target the music to audiences outside of its traditional genres. Observing the data allowed us to find more places for KID to be discovered on the platform and served to the right users.
Molly: As I mentioned, the recommendations are powered by data. But there are cases, like when an artist releases a new track, where there is little or no listening data available.
In these cases, we look at additional factors, such as signs of growing popularity. For example, if a song climbs the charts, it becomes a valuable signal for our recommendation algorithms.
Another key factor is the input of the JJ team, whose cultural expertise helps identify songs they think our users will enjoy. And this year we’ve seen some incredible success from artists around the world. Check out our 2024 Top Wrapped Lists to see what our listeners deemed the songs, artists and albums of the year!
Explore your personalized 2024 packed and learn more about this year’s campaign and experience on our 2024 Wrapped hub.