What Is Spotify Wrapped? A Primer On The Annual Phenomenon
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2 hours ago
Plus a brief history of the annual phenomenon
Every winter, music lovers wait with bated breath to see Spotify’s analysis of their listening habits. With funky colours, shareable infographics and cryptic ‘auras’ (in 2023, anyway) that come to define your entire (digital) personality, Spotify Wrapped Day has morphed into something of a cult-followed holiday. So when will it land in 2025? Here’s what you need to know.
Spotify Wrapped 2025: Release Date, Themes & More
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What Is Spotify Wrapped?
Spotify Wrapped is an annual feature of the world’s most popular music streaming service, providing users with statistical insight into their listening habits over the past year. The data is usually presented to the user in an Instagram-story style slideshow with aesthetic infographics available to easily download and share on various social media platforms – perfect for showing off your listening habits
While specific themes and categories vary year on year (from your listening ‘aura’ to your adventurousness), every year the data includes your top artists, top songs, preferred genres and the biggie: your total minutes spent listening. Another feature that reveals hearty competition among music stans (read: stalker fans) is the top artist result, which comes with an extra layer: Spotify will tell you what percentile of listeners you are in, with fans competing for the coveted 0.001 percent slot – the perfect infographic for some online boasting.
Spotify also reveals data gathered from all of its users across the globe (of which there are a whopping 713 million), meaning your results can be compared on a global scale. At the end, listeners are presented with a special 2025 playlist titled ‘Your Top Songs’, containing your top 100 listened-to songs.
Spotify Wrapped 2025 Release Date
No specific news just yet on when our Spotify Wrapped analyses will land, though the music streaming platform assured us it is ‘coming soon’ on Monday 1 December. Last year it landed on Wednesday 4 December, so our money is on Wednesday 3 December for Spotify Wrapped 2025.
Since it launched in 2015 (then called ‘Year in Music’), Spotify Wrapped has always landed in the last week of November or the first week of December. The previous release dates are:
- 2024: 4 December
- 2023: 29 November
- 2022: 30 November
- 2021: 1 December
- 2020: 2 December
- 2019: 5 December
- 2018: 6 December
- 2017: 6 December
- 2016: 6 December
- 2015: 7 December
Spotify Wrapped is big news: with more than 700 million users across the globe, in 2023, the music streaming platform revealed more than a third of its listeners engaged with their personalised Wrapped content. And over the past decade it has spawned a cross-cultural ‘wrapped’ phenomenon. With more and more apps tracking our behaviour, you can engage with your wrapped stats across everything from supermarket shopping to fitness apps, reading tracking apps and even banking apps. All typically come with with shareable graphics so you can send to your friends, and one particularly British highlight is the Sainsbury’s top buyer gimmick. London’s number one buyer of guacamole? You can blame that on my summer picnics…
How Can I Access Spotify Wrapped?
Spotify Wrapped is available to all Spotify users, including those with free accounts. The day it drops, Wrapped pops up on your homepage as soon as you open the app – though technical glitches as millions of people flock to the platform can cause delays.
For a user to qualify, Spotify says they must have listened to enough music to extract data from – ‘a few hours’ will reportedly do the trick. For an individual song to qualify, it must have been listened to for at least 30 seconds. Listening behaviour across the entirety of the year is included – usually up to mid-November, but Spotify has never given a firm date. One thing we know for sure is that December listening does not count, so it’s prime time to squeeze your favourite Christmas music in.
Finally, the key facet to ensure you are involved: you must have a Spotify account. That said, Apple has introduced a competitor year in music feature, too, called ‘Replay’, while YouTube Music has ‘Recap’, Tidal has ‘Rewind’ and Deezer presents ‘My Deezer Year’.
