Spotify Wrapped 2025 Is Here: See Your Year in Music Like Never Before

Spotify has on the whole unwrapped its yearly Wrapped feature, which allows users to peek at their personal listening history through the past year. The Wrapped, which was first launched in 2016, takes individual music habits and puts them in a visually appealing format that users can easily share on social media.

The yearly Wrapped campaign has always been a big driver of user engagement for Spotify. The company's app downloads and app store visibility spikes have usually happened together with the Wrapped release. Thus, Guillaume Huin, McDonald's social media director, perfectly called it a “masterclass on fan advocacy”, pointing out its effectiveness in marketing.

At the same time, the project has been criticized by different people. Data privacy has been one of the main concerns raised by the observers, and they argue that the tracking of users habits by the platform is a very unethical practice. Moreover, Spotify's recommendation algorithm has also been criticized for pushing users to certain styles of music, thus occasionally creating a rather narrow range of choices. Critics further mention the past issues of artist payment, arguing that the Wrapped serves mostly as a marketing tool for the platform rather than the artists. A point of sin for the 2021 Guardian sarcastically commented that the campaign was “free advertising for a company that has been widely condemned for not extending a fair share of its profits and power to artists."

Nonetheless, the pushback didn’t stop Wrapped from being dubbed the unstoppable king in the music streaming realm which got rivals to leap towards creating their own sorts of personalized listening summaries. It is the consumer engagement across the sector that the campaign has influenced in a marketing strategy shaping and it is the sector that the campaign has influenced in a marketing strategy shaping.