Tag: Wrapped Q+A

From Breakout Pop Stars to Country Crossovers, Here’s the Scoop on 2024’s Biggest Music Trends on Spotify

December 4, 2024

Music has always been at the heart of the annual Spotify Wrapped experience, offering fans a unique reflection of the year gone by. And 2024 was quite the year, showing up with its own set of trends, moments, and movements that redefined the music landscape.

A new batch of pop stars has entered superstardom, country is reaching new heights of popularity, and indie acts are achieving global streaming success: It’s been an exciting year for music. But what are the real stories behind the trends? Which genres surprised us, and which artists broke through the noise?

To unpack the musical moments that defined 2024 on Spotify, For the Record sat down with two of our editorial experts: John Stein, Head of North American Editorial, and Astrid Storm, Senior Project Manager, Global Editorial.

Happy Wrapped! Level with us: Which 2024 music trend surprised you the most?

John: Country seemed to further extend its dominance and reach in 2024. We had superstars like Beyoncé and Post Malone release incredibly successful albums in the genre, and we saw breakout moments from Dasha with “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” and Shaboozey with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”—the latter on pace to crack a billion streams in less than eight months. The sonic reach of the genre continues to impress on a global level.

Astrid: It’s also been really exciting to see how Afro house has captivated audiences worldwide. The genre has moved from street parties in Lagos to clubs in Mykonos and beyond. This summer’s hit “Move” by Adam Port, Stryv, and Malachiii is a perfect example of the blend of pop and Afro house, racking up more than 370 million streams to date. As a genre, Afro house is hitting the mainstream alongside Afrobeats and Amapiano, which are still resonating globally. Our dance editors are doing a brilliant job showcasing this trend in playlists like Umami, Tantra, and Afro House Pulse.

What about emerging genres or subgenres—what stood out to you both this year?

John: Each year we’re seeing listeners explore new spaces and discover new genres and artists. I’ve loved seeing hard techno have a moment in the dance space this year. It’s high bpm, aggressive, and makes you want to sweat in a packed club. An artist like Sara Landry is a prime example.

Also, the continued emergence of alternative country, folk, and Americana-leaning artists has been amazing to see. We house a lot of them in our playlist Homegrown, and in 2024 we saw the true audience potential of the genre and community.

Astrid: What we now know as “sexy drill” really had a moment in 2024. New York icons like Ice Spice, Chow Lee, Bay Swag, and Cash Cobain—who is widely considered the genre’s pioneer—paved the way for sexy drill’s explosive rise. Yet, it was artists like Don Toliver with his hit “ATTITUDE” and Belfast’s Jordan Adetunji with “KEHLANI” who propelled the sound to new heights on the charts. Artists from both hip-hop and R&B are now embracing sexy drill across the globe. In October, our hip-hop editors launched the Sexy Drill playlist, both a celebration and reflection of the growth in this sound.

How about your favorite music trend of 2024? 

Astrid: One thing that took me by surprise this year was our rock editors opening my eyes—and ears—to the world of hardcore punk. In the wake of the pandemic, hardcore has made a global comeback, still becoming more diverse and striking a chord with younger listeners like myself. Bands like Turnstile, Speed, Scowl, DRAIN, High Vis, and Drug Church are at the forefront of this movement, capturing mainstream attention. Our playlists like The Breakdown and Hardcore Rising are helping me dive deeper into the adrenaline and raw energy of this subculture.

John: My favorite music trend of 2024 was pop star (re)emergence. It had been a slow couple years for emerging pop artists, but this year we had huge breakout moments for Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, among others. Not only did each of these artists have huge songs, but their albums resonated as well. For the first time in a while we had multiple huge albums all taking off at once. I think you could confidently say it was the year of women in pop, and our top albums list showcases that as well.

Social media influences everything these days. How did you see that reflected in music trends and discovery in 2024?

John: We’re not seeing the massive influx of viral tracks as we have in past years. What we are seeing is more dedicated fandoms emerge and create virality—Charli xcx’s BRAT summer meant that many tracks on her album had viral moments and lifespans beyond the release moment. In general, we’re seeing more depth of listening for artists and genres than the flash-in-the-pan moments of the past few years.

Speaking of influential forces, how has Gen Z influenced the music landscape this year?

Astrid: Something myself and our indie editors are excited about—which is particularly popular with Gen Z women—is “fantasy/theatrical indie.” It’s characterized by bold, expressive storytelling and worldbuilding, often with a darker, witchy tone. Think the mythical folklore of Yaelokre, or the baroque-pop renaissance of The Last Dinner Party, or the visceral narratives of Paris Paloma. For me, it follows in the lineage of otherworldly, slightly left-of-center stars like Björk and Kate Bush, but with a very modern twist.

John: Gen Z’s openness to music from any place and any time in history continues to shape the landscape at large. The fact that shoegaze, a genre that emerged out of the U.K. counterculture in the late ’80s, could have so much influence on American teenagers in 2024 really speaks to this. Shoegaze Now is one of the playlists where we’ve seen this discovery happen.

Turning to our influential editorial playlists, how did these shape music trends this year?

John: We’re always at the forefront of new trends, working to establish new genre spaces, introduce listeners to emerging artists, and provide context for listeners. Our Afro Ritmo playlist is a good example—the list encapsulates the crossover between the Afrobeats and reggaeton genres. Fans of individual artists might not even be aware of the cultural influences, but you feel this melting pot of sounds as you listen through the playlist. 

You’ll also find an editorial Watch Feed featured on the playlist on mobile, a new feature that provides editor-written context on artists and tracks on the playlist. This is a very exciting new strategy for our editorial team. Editors spend all day, every day, listening to new music, researching the best new artists—it’s time we talk about those discoveries directly with listeners. On your mobile device, you can tap the rectangle under the Afro Ritmo playlist to read track reviews directly from the experts.

Let’s pull out your crystal balls: Any music trends you’re predicting here for 2025?

John: I think we’ll continue to see more and more new subgenres emerge. 2024 was probably the most sonically diverse year for popular music in history, and I don’t see that changing in 2025. The monoculture will never be what it was, but people are still looking for points of connection: brat summer, the Eras Tour, “Not Like Us.” These moments that cut through will be bigger than ever in 2025—look out for holiday listening to grow even more next year.

To make a more specific prediction, it feels like a ripe moment for confessional, theater-kid, pop-rock-inspired artists to emerge—imagine if Gavin Degraw and Lady Gaga had a baby, and they were addicted to their phone. Benson Boone, [the animated musical series] Hazbin Hotel, and Olivia Rodrigo are all clues for Gen Z preferences, from my perspective.

Explore your personalized 2024 Wrapped and learn more about this year’s campaign and experience on our 2024 Wrapped hub.

The Art and Science Behind Spotify Wrapped

December 4, 2024

Spotify Wrapped is officially here, and with it comes your highly personal look back at how you soundtracked your year. 

We know your year in review evokes all the feels, but perhaps you’d like a bit more insight into all the ways your listening and our lists come together. From the skilled team of music editors who help develop Wrapped to the ace engineers who are evolving our tools to better fit your listening habits, it’s truly art and science working side by side. 

We caught up with JJ Italiano, Spotify’s Head of Global Music Curation and Discovery, and Molly Holder, Spotify’s Senior Director of Personalization, to reveal more about the magic behind Wrapped.

Happy Wrapped launch to you both! First, how does our annual experience highlight the work of both our brilliant tech team and the expertise of our editorial team? 

JJ: The work of Spotify’s editorial experts is grounded in a deep understanding of music culture. We are always working as a global team of music editors to identify and amplify trending songs, stories, and artists to the user—and, crucially, to contextualize those moments in curated playlists or other editorial offerings to help users form a deep, lasting connection to the track or artist. 

Spotify Wrapped gives listeners a chance to look back at the artist and track connections they’ve made over the course of the year through their personalized Wrapped list while also exploring some of the songs and artists that helped define the year in music culture more broadly through our editorial end-of-year Wrapped playlists.

Molly: The beauty of Wrapped is how much it reflects each individual user. Whether it’s your top song, total minutes listened, or favorite artist, 2024 Wrapped celebrates how you listened this year. 

We believe that great personalization fuels discovery: We’re powering nearly 2 billion music discoveries every day, connecting listeners with artists and genres they might never have found otherwise.

In addition to the work JJ and his team are doing, we’re excited to launch several brand-new personalized Wrapped features this year. From innovations like Your Music Evolution to the expansion of our AI-driven tools (such as AI DJ, AI Playlist, and Wrapped AI Podcast), users will have even more ways to explore the songs that defined their year.

JJ, can you share more about how the work of Spotify’s editorial team influences what users discover throughout the year, culminating in what shows up in their Wrapped? 

JJ: Over the course of the year, our editors around the world are constantly monitoring new music and cultural trends to identify important rising tracks and artists. We look at a vast range of qualitative and quantitative signals both on- and off-platform which inform our editorial decisions. 

We also continuously monitor in-playlist performance to understand what tracks and artists users are responding to. This helps signal what tracks should be added to more playlists. Your Wrapped may be comprised of artists that you’ve discovered anywhere on Spotify, including our editorial surfaces.

Molly, building on that, how do Spotify’s algorithms use those editorial selections to enhance personalized recommendations outside of Wrapped to ensure our users are discovering new music all year round? 

Molly: Spotify personalization is a mix of giving you what you like while pushing you a bit outside your comfort zone, too. We learn about what you like based on the ways you interact with Spotify, and our personalization technology takes into account a number of signals that you, as users, provide. For example, as you add songs to a playlist, listen to an entire song, skip a song, or engage with an artist, it sends us clear signals that help us tailor our programming to your taste.

But it’s also our job to determine when we should introduce you to something new. That’s when we consider certain additional factors, such as signs of popularity and how other users are engaging with tracks. We also rely on our editorial team, who play a crucial role in curating playlists and, through their knowledge, intuition, and expertise, help teach our machines. 

Recommendations are shaped by a number of signals, each contributing to the decision of whether a track should be suggested to a user. While these signals are weighted differently, listener satisfaction is always a priority, and we only recommend music we think listeners will want to hear. For more information on the most significant inputs that drive our personalization, you can learn more here.

How does Spotify use both human curation and algorithms to combat repetitiveness in recommendations?

Molly: Finding the right balance between familiarity and discovery is incredibly difficult. One reason is that music is different from other formats. On other platforms, you may consume a piece of content once and then never revisit it again. On Spotify, you can listen to the same song dozens of times, so we know that some repetitiveness is good.

But we don’t just paint by numbers. We listen to our users and the descriptive way they are saying they’d like to see us better balance familiarity with discovery, new with old, music with podcasts and audiobooks. We take that qualitative feedback to heart just as much as we weigh the quantitative signals when we make decisions about what to tweak in our algorithms. 

Can you share how human expertise and algorithms have worked together to propel a song or artist to success on Spotify?

JJ: One of this year’s most compelling examples would be Charli xcx’s BRAT album and the associated cultural moment, “brat summer.” Our editors were able to hear the album early and identified it as one of the top stories of the summer to come. As the album rollout and cultural conversation accelerated and branched off into new tracks and trends, our editors worked to reflect each moment rapidly and participate in the conversation holistically throughout our editorial surfaces.

BRAT not fitting neatly into any one genre gave us the opportunity to stretch our genre remits and work collaboratively to support her across multiple playlists and destinations on platform. Not only did Charli land on the cover of our New Music Friday playlist on album release day, but also on the covers of hot girl walk, Party Hits, and hyperpop, which helped us target the music to audiences outside of her traditional genre lanes. Watching the data allowed us to find more places for BRAT to be discovered on platform, and served to the right users.

Molly: As I mentioned, recommendations are powered by data. But there are instances—like when an artist releases a new track—where there’s little to no listening data available.

In those cases, we look at additional factors, such as signs of growing popularity. For example, if a song is climbing the charts, it becomes a valuable signal for our recommendation algorithms. 

Another key factor is input from JJ’s team, whose cultural expertise helps identify songs they believe our users will enjoy. And this year, we’ve seen some amazing breakout success from artists all over the world. Check out our 2024 Wrapped top lists to see what our listeners have deemed the songs, artists, and albums of the year! 

Explore your personalized 2024 Wrapped and learn more about this year’s campaign and experience on our 2024 Wrapped hub.

The Year in Audiobooks and How We’re Celebrating Spotify for Authors With a Special Wrapped Experience

December 4, 2024

From building a richer, more dynamic experience for listeners to expanding the data and promotional tools for authors and publishers, we’ve continued to keep “reading” top of mind on Spotify this year. And now, as we reflect back on 2024, it’s time to see what resonated with our listeners and how Wrapped for Authors has provided authors and publishers valuable insights into their work.

What listeners loved

It’s been a year since we launched Audiobooks in Premium, and both new releases and back-catalog titles from buzzworthy authors gained audiences across every genre on Spotify. If you’re looking for new audiobooks to add to your queue, discover the top global and U.S. audiobooks of 2024 here.

This year, we’ve also seen the boom of page-to-screen novels reflected in audiobook listening on Spotify. Colleen Hoover’s romance novel It Ends with Us and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West are examples of acclaimed books that found their way to the big screen, and listens skyrocketed. James Clavell’s historical novel Shōgun saw a resurgence in popularity this year as its television adaptation kicked off in February. Other popular television shows based on books are George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood and Julia Quinn’s Romancing Mister Bridgerton. 

Check out the Wrapped Audiobooks hub on platform for more listening inspiration with playlists for Breakout Authors, Best Narration, and more. 

Wrapped for Authors

This year marks our first-ever Spotify Wrapped for Authors experience, giving eligible publishers and authors the opportunity to reflect on their achievements from 2024 through personalized data stories. Authors will receive insights about who their listeners are and how their audiobooks resonated with fans around the world, from the most popular time of day for consumption of their titles to the percentage of their audiences who started listening to an audiobook because of one of the author’s other titles. 

For the Record talked with Rebecca McGuire, Manager for Audiobook Partnerships and Licensing at Spotify, to learn more about this year’s inaugural Wrapped for Authors.

What can authors expect to find in their Wrapped for Authors experience? 

When we take a step back, there’s a lot to celebrate with audiobooks in 2024! We carried that spirit into the Wrapped for Authors experience; it’s a fun way to recognize authors, their work, and their fans. For the first time, publishers and authors can get access to their own personalized, one-of-a-kind data stories that give them a sense of how their audiobooks resonated with listeners around the world this year.   

How does Wrapped help authors connect more deeply with their fans? 

Spotify is very committed to helping authors build deeper connections—that commitment comes through in all of the tools and experiences we offer to our partners. For example, we launched Countdown Pages for audiobooks this year, which allows fans to presave upcoming audiobooks and count down to their release, which we know helps build hype and leads to more week-one streams. Wrapped for Authors is an extension of that work, providing the perfect opportunity for authors to learn more about and thank the fans who have listened and come along on their journeys! 

What are some of the biggest Spotify audiobook highlights from the past year?

There is so much to celebrate. First, we’ve expanded audiobooks to more markets so more listeners around the world can benefit from our Audiobooks in Premium offer. We’ve launched powerful new tools for authors and publishers, including the recent addition of Spotify for Authors, our platform for them to gain marketing tools and insights on Spotify. And, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve doubled down on bringing authors and publishers closer to their fans. I had the privilege of attending our recent fan event in New York City with Coco Mellors of Blue Sisters, and it was very rewarding to see the magic between an author and her most devoted readers and listeners. Now I look forward to seeing how our partners across the industry enjoy their Wrapped for Authors experience. 

What was the most memorable audiobook you listened to in 2024? 

It was undoubtedly Dolly Alderton’s Good Material. I listened to it when it was first released in January, and I am still thinking about Jen and Andy and their hilariously tragic relationship woes that were masterfully brought to life by narrators Arthur Darvill and Vanessa Kirby. To me, the sign of a great audiobook is when you can’t imagine reading it in any other format. I literally laughed out loud while listening to this audiobook, and I am now a firm believer that Dolly’s snappy and hilarious dialogue simply must always be listened to! 

And while there were certainly too many great audiobooks published in 2024 to count, I also love that back-catalog titles are finding great success on Spotify, creating pathways for authors to gain new audiences and giving listeners the ability to enjoy books of all kinds, right where they already are. 

If you’re on the hunt for your next great audiobook listen, check out our first-ever Global Top Audiobooks in Premium of the Year list, led by 2024’s buzziest author, Sarah J. Mass, and her A Court of Thorns and Roses series (a series that I have personally listened to about 12 times). There are some great picks on there! 

Explore your personalized 2024 Wrapped and learn more about this year’s campaign and experience on our 2024 Wrapped hub. Eligible authors can work directly with their publishers or Spotify reps to get access to their Wrapped for Authors experience.