Spotify Wrapped invented new genres this year

CNN
—

Every year, we Spotify users eagerly await “Wrapped,” our year-end roundup of our most-played artists and songs.

And every year, at least for the last five years, Spotify releases a new Wrapped feature so divisive that it threatens to eclipse the most popular music of the year.

For the 2024 edition, Spotify Wrapped’s new move is called “Your Music Evolution,” which assigns names to different “phases” of one’s listening habits. The wording is largely nonsensical: “Wild West Banjo Outlaw Country”, “Theater Potpourri Argentine Rock”, “Alien Grind Deathcore”. At least some of the words are genres.

The “stages” were at least partially curated through “machine learning,” Spotify said, which linked descriptors to specific songs. The connections it made were rather tenuous, users argued.

“Pink Pilates Princess” was a common refrain for listeners who played the music of new pop royalty like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Chappell Roan. “Pink” and “Princess” both appear on Roan’s debut album, but the presence of “Pilates” is puzzling. Alliterative rule of three, perhaps.

Some descriptions were truly inexplicable. “Vampire football rap”? (This applies to listeners of artists like Travis Scott and Future, who are at least rappers.) Other bizarre phrases included riffs on “catwalk,” “sweater weather,” “mallgoth,” and “pirate.” Even Frutiger Aero, a glossy aesthetic associated with the early 2000s Windows operating system, made it into Wrapped this year.

Some brave souls have dared to share their “Music Evolutions” on Spotify. Semafor media editor Max Tani didn’t seem proud of his “pumpkin spice banjo indie folk” winter.

“It’s unbelievable how Spotify manages to make listening to music – its core business – deeply embarrassing every year,” Tani wrote.

The divisive response to “Your Music Evolution” reminded others of last year’s Wrapped, which assigned users a “sound town,” a real place where they shared their musical tastes. The experiment revealed little about its users other than that residents of Burlington, Vermont, have a penchant for pop divas.