
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
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
07/10/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Proven offering builds on more than 20,000 live sporting events with greater automation, flexibility, and operational control
LTN , the industry leader in tran...
06/08/2026
Hornets Tech, a specialist in broadcast connectivity and IP video, is bringing a new range of encoders, decoders and an IPTV platform to IBC2026.
Broadcast in...
06/08/2026
Introducing Adobe for ChatGPT: Create, edit and get work done - all in ChatGPT
Deepti Pradeep August 6, 2026
0 Comments
The Adobe plugin in ChatGPT br...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
At IBC2026, MediaKind will make its first major appearance as a unified global powerhouse in video, showcasing one of the world's most comprehensive video i...
06/08/2026
Big Blue Marble (#5.A63) will demonstrate how its integrated technology and operational expertise help media companies scale premium services with less complexi...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research has received more than $500,000 in first-year fund...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Viruses are masters at invading our cells thanks to specialized proteins that coat their surfaces. When scientists design vaccines, they often crea...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-The brain has its own immune system, which detects threats and mounts a defense. A growing body of evidence has shown that in Alzheimer's disea...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research chemist Jin-Quan Yu has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve....
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research ranked third in the inaugural 2026 Cure Innovation Index recognizing the top-performing institutes and centers across the United S...
06/08/2026
Benjamin Cravatt, the Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology and a professor of chemis...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Dennis Burton, professor and the James & Jessie Minor Chair in Immu...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Inside every human cell, proteins are constantly being tagged with small chemical modifications after they're produced. Known as post-translati...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA-Scripps Research has established the Ian Wilson Endowed Chair, a new fa...
06/08/2026
Scripps Research's Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Science...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Professor Jin-Quan Yu of Scripps Research has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of sciences and ...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-For years, researchers have been hoping for vaccines that protect people against not just one strain of HIV, but every strain of the quickly mutati...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-The Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines, the nonprofit...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Building the complex 3D molecules needed for new medicines has alwa...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Fentanyl and related variants of the synthetic opioid kill more Americans each year than car accidents and gun violence combined. In too-high doses...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-What do decoding communication between organs and reimagining the future of genome editing have in common? They're among the scientific questio...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, app...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-For some people, cancer immunotherapies are life-changing. These treatments can turn the body's own immune system against a tumor, either elimi...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Many conditions that cause vision loss share a common feature: the ...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-RNA interference is a natural mechanism for living cells to control whether specific genes are being used or not.
Crowned with the 2006 Nobel Priz...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-The drugs that keep rheumatoid arthritis in check may one day help people stop drinking. A new Scripps Research study shows that an anti-inflammato...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Antibiotic resistance is one of the most urgent threats to global health, linked to an estimated 4.7 million deaths worldwide in 2019 alone. As mor...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Some of the world's best-selling diabetes drugs depend on a che...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Detecting infectious disease threats early and responding quickly can dramatically alter the course of an infectious outbreak. Technologies such as...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Molecular biophysicist Joan Pulupa will join Scripps Research in Ja...
06/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-HIV is globally so diverse, consisting of hundreds of thousands of ...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/08/2026
At this year's SET EXPO, PlayBox Neo will present recent innovations across its PlayBox Neo Suite and integrated range of broadcast media solutions. By show...
06/08/2026
Live demo at IBC2026 VisualOn Booth, Hall 5, Stand A55
Amsterdam, Netherlands Modern Streaming Solutions Private Limited, a rising force in India's dig...
06/08/2026
Screen Australia and YouTube Australia fund five new teams through eleventh Skip...
06/08/2026
How Karukera Studio Built a Media Production Hub with SNS EVO
Melanie Ciotti August 5, 2026
0 Comments
Hero images displays Karukera Studio in Sainte-...
06/08/2026
NHK drama series Rosanjin no Kamado shot on PYXIS 6K
Brie Clayton August 5, 2026
0 Comments
Blackmagic PYXIS 6K and DaVinci Resolve Studio capture the...
06/08/2026
Camera Match: AutoSetup 3d Plugin / script for Photomontages- Cinema 4D
Jamie Cardoso August 5, 2026
0 Comments
If you do any kind of Architectural Vi...
06/08/2026
In Time airs Monday 10 August at 9.35pm on RT One and RT Player
In Time is the first film account of the life of D nal Lunny, one of the most influential Iri...
06/08/2026
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners and enterprises can transform their workflows u...