Despite the launch of Spotify’s Artificial Intelligence DJ in February, the company’s highly anticipated 2023 Spotify Wrapped campaign is choosing to “celebrate the real stuff this year.”
For the past nine years, Spotify Wrapped has had the definitive word on our listening habits (and end-of-year Instagram Stories) by sharing users’ top artists, songs, and genres of the year. But it doesn’t end there: Each Wrapped campaign is designed around a different theme that correlates to the passing year. According to Wrapped, 2022 was a year of “emergence” where “everything [was] happening at once,” while 2021 was all about soundtracking the “new normal.”
We wanted to make it as a push to the onslaught of augmented stuff that came our way
Wrapped 2023 highlights the “real stuff” amidst a barrage of increasingly AI-generated content. “We wanted to make it as a push to the onslaught of augmented stuff that came our way,” Marie Rönn, the Global Group Creative Director at Spotify, told Mashable at a press briefing on Nov. 28. “We feel that all the music that people do and all the fan reactions is what is real. When someone wants to express something with their music, it’s very real. And when we listen to a piece of music, that feeling we feel is very real.”
The emphasis on realness in opposition to augmentation this year seems to contradict Spotify’s own use of generative AI in 2023. Not only did it launch its AI DJ which uses a combination of personalization technology, generative AI, curation, and an AI voice, but it also introduced AI voice translation for select podcasts using Open-AI’s voice-generating technology. Neither of which feels particularly real. After all, AI DJ is augmenting the way we listen to and discover new music.
Additionally, X, the AI DJ, will be exclusively spinning users’ Spotify Wrapped this week, adding some additional commentary. The Wrapped campaign includes the option to wander around the Wrapped experience on Spotify Roblox Island and “climb the charts in the metaverse” — all of which happens outside of the scope of reality.
You can’t have your AI cake and celebrate realness too.
