The holiday season is here, and with it comes a present for fans of end-of-year data, music and marketing: Spotify Wrapped.
Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny has been named its most-played artist for a fourth time, dethroning Taylor Swift.
On Wednesday, the music streaming giant delivered its annual recap — giving its hundreds of millions of users worldwide a look at the top songs, artists, podcasts and other audio that filled their ears over the past year (give or take a month and change).
Spotify isn’t the only music streamer to roll out a yearly glimpse of data collected from consumers’ online lives. But since its launch about a decade ago, Wrapped has become one of the most anticipated, despite facing criticism from users.
Chart-topping performers continue to dominate
Bad Bunny, the reggaeton-and-then-some artist, was 2025’s most-streamed artist globally, having earned more than 19.8 billion streams. He is followed by Swift, The Weeknd, Drake and Billie Eilish, in that order.
For the last two years, Swift has commanded the top spot globally — claiming it in 2023 and holding it for 2024. Bad Bunny held the coveted title for three years in a row beginning in 2020, and now, he’s back on top.
The most-streamed album globally was Bad Bunny’s Debi Tirar Mas Fotos, followed by the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack and three releases from 2024: Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, SZA’s SOS Deluxe: LANA and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, in that order.
The most-streamed song title goes to Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s collaboration Die with a Smile, which has racked up more than 1.7 billion streams. Then it’s Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, Mars and Rose’s APT., Alex Warren’s Ordinary and Bad Bunny’s DtMF.
How does Spotify compile Wrapped reports?
Spotify collects listening data from Jan. 1 through around mid-November.
That gives the company time to solidify finishing touches and deliver its recap to users by early December. But it also means your late November and December streaming habits won’t be included, which may be why your favourite holiday songs aren’t on the list, or other year-end hits.
For top songs, artists and — for the first time this year — albums to show up on Spotify Wrapped, the platform looks at a mix of what you stream and how long you listen for.
According to Spotify, users must listen to at least 30 tracks for more than 30 seconds each to get top songs. For artists, users need to listen to at least five unique artists for more than 30 seconds. And for top album, users need to have listened to at least 70 per cent of the tracks on one album.
The Spotify Wrapped social media trend is helping some Canadian musicians receive a boost, by reminding fans of the tunes they loved that year.
The company confirmed that data is collected evenly across all platforms — and that streaming in “offline” mode will also be counted, as long as the device connects back to the internet a few weeks before Wrapped’s launch.
Listening using Spotify’s “private mode” features, meanwhile, won’t contribute to any rankings, but will still count toward total time spent on the platform. And Spotify says “background sounds,” like white noise, are filtered out.
Marc Hazan, senior vice-president of marketing and partnerships at Spotify, said his team started thinking about 2025 Wrapped the day last year’s recap was launched.
“It’s a full year production that touches, without question, every function within Spotify,” Hazan told The Associated Press. On Day 1, he noted, that includes looking at what users think of the Wrapped that just dropped.
What’s new with Spotify Wrapped this year?
Like every year, there are a few new features. Those include the introduction of “Top Albums,” a fan leaderboard to show users where they stack up in an artist’s streams and a “Listening Age” feature that compares a user’s streaming habits to those in their age range.
There is also something called “Wrapped Party,” an interactive feature that allows users to compare their Wrapped with other Spotify users.
These additions differ from last year, when some Spotify users complained on social media that Wrapped, which undergoes design changes every year, was minimalist in 2024. They said it lacked previous features like “Top Cities,” “Audio Auras” and “Top Genres.” The latter has been reinstated for 2025.
Other revisited features in 2025 include “Top Songs,” which now will allow users to see how many times they streamed their top 100 tracks and a “Top Song Quiz.”
How is AI used?
Among the backlash Spotify received last year was speculation over how much artificial intelligence played a role in compiling Wrapped.
The most visible use of AI in Spotify’s 2024 Wrapped was an accompanying podcast powered by generative AI. Spotify didn’t repeat the podcast this year but is introducing another feature, Archive, which uses a large language model to break down your listening on specific days.
That’s the most AI-focused part of 2025’s Wrapped, Hazan said. But the technology is still more broadly supplemented across Spotify’s technical operations today, including in scaling the reach of its annual recap.
“Rooted into Wrapped is human creativity,” Hazan said, stressing that hundreds of people work on pulling together the recap each year. Technology like AI, he noted, helps “fast track” and “enhance” the product so it can reach the platform’s more than 700 million users.
