Spotify Wrapped says this year belonged to the ‘pink pilates princesses’

Every year, we Spotify users eagerly await Wrapped, the year-end roundup of our most-played artists and songs.

And every year, at least in the last five, Spotify unleashes a new Wrapped feature so divisive that it threatens to eclipse the most popular music of the year.

For its 2024 edition, Spotify Wrapped’s new gambit is “Your Music Evolution,” which assigns names to different “phases” of one’s listening habits. The phrases are largely nonsensical: “Wild west banjo outlaw country,” “theatrical potpourri Argentine rock,” “alien grind deathcore.” At least some of the words are genres.

The “phases” were at least partly curated by “machine learning,” Spotify said, which linked descriptors with specific songs. The links it drew were somewhat tenuous, users argued.

“Pink pilates princess” was a common refrain for listeners who marathoned the music of new pop royalty like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Chappell Roan. “Pink” and “princess” both appear on Roan’s debut album, but the presence of “pilates” is puzzling. Alliterative rule of threes, perhaps.

Some descriptions were truly inexplicable. “Vampire football rap”? (This, for listeners of artists like Travis Scott and Future, who are at least rappers.) Other bizarre phrases included riffs on “catwalk,” “sweater weather,” “mallgoth” and “pirate.” Even Frutiger Aero, a glossy aesthetic associated with the early 2000s Windows operating system, made it into Wrapped this year.

“unbelievable how every year spotify manages to make listening to music – its core business – deeply embarrassing,” Tani wrote.

The divisive reaction to “Your Music Evolution reminded others of last year’s Wrapped, in which users were assigned a “Sound Town,” a real place that shared their music taste. The experiment revealed little about its users, except that the residents of Burlington, Vermont, have a penchant for pop divas.

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