A magnifying glass on Spotify Wrapped – The Daily Aztec

As a gift on your birthday, your 2024 Music Algorithm is wrapped with a bow. For many Spotify users around the world, the end of November and the beginning of December give us another reason to celebrate. Now that we can carry millions of songs in our pockets daily, we have all the more reason to see an accurate analysis of our annual music overview. But how exactly does Spotify gather this data and adjust our algorithms to our ever-changing tastes in musical vibrations?

As a global company and streaming platform, Spotify reaches more than 180 countries. Publicly released in 2008, the service has overtaken every other method of listening to music. With the goal of a “frictionless music experience for listeners,” Spotify staff dedicated countless hours to receiving quality customer feedback regarding desirable streaming preferences. This is what has made Spotify the dominant figure out of all other streaming platforms taking over the music world.

Spotify officially titled Wrapped as their year-end music analysis for users in 2016, but didn’t become popular until the feature was added to the app. Before 2019, users could only access their personal year in music through the website. But what really revolutionized Wrapped was intern Jewel Ham’s story concept inspired interactivity between listeners and different functions. To dive deeper into what Spotify Wrapped really is, we’ll observe the summary analysis, the 2024 popular music predictions, and how algorithms adapt throughout the year.

Staff constantly update users’ wrapped views with different widgets every year. In 2023, Spotify listeners received a personalized character card associated with their music (“Me in 2023”), their perfect city match (“SoundTown”), along with their top-five most listened genres and artists and a top-five artist message. They also get an in-depth data analysis of the number of artists and genres listened to and how many minutes were spent in total.

Not surprisingly, correlated with one of the most successful tours of our century, Taylor Swift was the most listened to artist last year. She was followed by Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake and Peso Pluma sharing the podium. In Rowan Davies’ article on TechRadarhe expects to see similar trends from last year with Taylor Swift landing in the top five alongside Troye Sivan, Charlie XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. Many of these artists’ recognition skyrocketed for various reasons such as virality on TikTok, hit album releases, and popular collaborations. However each of these artists achieved greater fame, it’s a strong prediction that they’ll top the Spotify charts in Wrapped.

Although there were rumors and concerns about the unofficial ‘deadline’ for Spotify to stop analyzing trends after October 31st, Spotify X condemned these conjectures with a treat. However, they continue the mystery of the ambiguous deadline for wrapped data to begin summarizing. The silver lining is that there’s no need to stress about completely adjusting your Wrapped results on Halloween.

But this means that over the course of the year, Spotify will track your regular music listening habits and suggest new music based on your personal algorithm. The bandits for recommendations such as treatments is an AI system designed to recommend previously listened songs as well as new ones with similar styles. It solves each user’s algorithm trend with a similarity/distance formula like the one shown below:

This specific equation is known as Euclidean formula is used to calculate the direct distance between two points – in this case, the distance between your and others’ preferences in music. Each person’s preferences are analyzed through the different playlists they create, the songs they skip (and how long they spend listening to a song before they skip), and the location they listen from.

Consider the songs you listen to. Spotify will then categorize your music tastes into four broad groups, grouping artists and music into genres: country, jazz, classic rock and folk. Each of your songs will be placed in these categories, divided by how extreme a song represents a certain genre. This is considered a t-SNE algorithm to map each song into a two-dimensional latent space.

After analyzing the audio data of the songs people are listening to, The BaRT uses 30 second rule to infer a listener’s enjoyment of recommended music. If they listen for more than thirty seconds before skipping, Spotify will continue to suggest similar songs. The same applies in particular to how much time you spend on a playlist: The longer you listen, the more Spotify will recommend songs of a similar category.

Finally, Spotify takes into account the personal information users share such as location, language and age. This demographic information plays a clear role in understanding what is preferred or not preferred by a specific locale, speaker or generation. For example, if French is your language of choice on Spotify, the algorithm will give you more French music recommendations.

While we have an influential role in the music we listen to—and what will contribute to our Wrapped each year—Spotify constantly tracks our preferences with data analysis tools. By using collaborative, content-based and language filteringSpotify introduces us to old favorites and fresh songs we may not have listened to before. As the cherry on top at the end of the year, our customized Wrapped profiles encourage us to set new personal records with our listening habits.

As a Spotify user, you must be eager to see your 2024 Music Trend Analysis. Now that you’ve learned a lot about the complex systems and programs Spotify uses to track your preferences, you can just enjoy this gift a little more. Spotify is your personal music assistant, supplying your music taste with all its necessities and more. So while you’re listening to a new song on a bus ride or on your way to class, remember that Spotify has sent you this music to enjoy—but don’t be afraid to skip before thirty seconds are up!