If you haven’t already heard the news through everyone’s Instagram stories, Spotify Wrapped 2025 is out. Wrapped is the app’s annual end-of-year recap, offering subscribers a snapshot of their listening habits and a flashy layout of the music that supposedly defined their year.
Whether you’re a heavy podcast listener or a music aficionado, there’s something for everyone to scroll through.
But how accurate is it?
Plenty of people, especially on our very own Yik Yak, insist their Wrapped feels “wrong.” One user wrote, “the dichotomy of my top song being a YouTuber’s song and my listening age being 85,” alongside the popular Cynthia Erivo scratching-head meme.
How can a platform that tracks your playlists and every second of listening end up so skewed?
The most consistent Wrapped categories have been the top five artists, songs, and albums. But Spotify has increasingly layered on experimental add-ons with this year’s shiny new metric: “Music Age.”
The feature analyzes the era your listening habits come from and assigns you a “true age.” If you’ve ever said you were “born in the wrong generation,” you probably landed somewhere between 60 and 80 – like me.
I listen to a lot of motown and classic rock, so this felt pretty accurate. In others’ opinions, their assigned listening age was wildly off, and this was the first wave of complaints I saw from friends and online.
Even the standard categories weren’t immune. Some users reported missing or incorrect information. Many pointed to Stats for Spotify as a more accurate gauge of their listening history, which is an odd discrepancy considering both platforms draw from the same underlying data.
To understand why this happens, we can look to Spotify’s own explanation. According to the company’s “2025 Guide to the Data,” Wrapped “takes your 2025 listening journey from January until mid-November.” So, even if your favorite artist releases an album on Nov. 16 and you listen obsessively for days, none of that counts.
As someone whose listening habits shift week to week, this alone explains why my Wrapped feels misleading.
Your data can also be warped by in-app playlists, including Daylists and Daily Mixes. Spotify notes that these playlists can influence your metrics even if you don’t actually listen to them.
Ultimately, Spotify Wrapped is a marketing strategy disguised as a personal data portrait. My advice? Take it with a grain of salt. Wrapped is fun, but only you truly know what you listened to, and no algorithm – not even a beautifully animated one – can tell you otherwise.
Personally, I’ll be making my own Wrapped this year, hand-picking my favorite songs, albums and artists, which is a surprisingly fun design exercise.
Moral of the story: ignore the algorithms and listen to what you love. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not marketed.
