#Spotify Wrapped

#Spotify Wrapped

Even as listeners' attention spans have dwindled, the art of making and promoting an album persists. In 2021, Adele convinced Spotify to remove shuffle as the default option for playing an album, telling fans, "Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended." Around the same time, Taylor Swift shifted her strategy to release albums in their entirety, instead of teasing fans with a breadcrumb trail of singles.

The advertisement spoof began innocuously, introducing the 2025 edition of Spotify "Wrapped"-the streaming service's popular year-in-review feature that repackages data gathered from individual listeners into brightly hued, shareable statistics-which the show also tackled last year. When Spotify revealed to Andrew Dismukes's character that he'd jammed to 2,705 minutes of Steely Dan since January, his character smiled knowingly: "Yeah, that tracks."

Joe Aboud, a former major label executive and founder of 444 Sounds, says streaming platforms now see 100,000 to 120,000 new tracks uploaded every day - roughly 1.5 million a week. AI-generated tracks already make up nearly one in five uploads on some platforms, said Jeremy Morris, a media and cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, raising concerns about royalty dilution and algorithmic bias.

Bad Bunny was the most-listened-to artist on Spotify globally in 2025, the platform revealed on December 3 as part of its Wrapped celebration. In total, he scored 19.8 billion streams over the course of the year. His 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, propelled him to the top spot and was the most-streamed album of the year. He was joined in the top five by the most-streamed artists in the States: Taylor Swift at spot two, the Weeknd at No. 3,