Spotify Wrapped is the end-of-year celebration for the platform’s users. While Spotify wraps its Wrapped up with different bells and whistles each year (2024 saw the debut of an AI-generated podcast discussing your music), the core experience remains the same: a roundup of your top five tracks and artists, and a custom playlist of your most played songs of the year.
Spotify Wrapped is a great way to look back on your listening habits and share them with friends, but it’s easy to feel disappointed. Perhaps your favorite song of the year didn’t appear at all while your top five tracks are filled with background music you put on while working. If you want your Spotify Wrapped to better represent your music taste and newly discovered songs, you can try these tips to build the perfect Spotify Wrapped for 2025.
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Look back at all the tracks you listened to
6
Put the work into discovering new music earlier in the year
Late discoveries may not show up at all
Source: Spotify
Two of my favorite songs of 2024 didn’t appear in my Spotify Wrapped. Despite the fact I was listening to them on repeat and talking about them whenever I got the chance, they didn’t appear in my Wrapped playlist or my top five tracks. This is because I discovered them in early November, and thus missed the cut-off point for my 2024 Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify doesn’t always confirm the cut-off date ahead of time, but we know it’s somewhere in November. Spotify confirmed in 2023 that it counts tracks past October 31, and it released every Wrapped between 30 November and 6 December. Spotify also doesn’t count songs in December, likely to stop our Wrapped from only showing Christmas songs.
Spotify has plenty of tools for discovering new music. Made For You playlists, New Music Friday, Song Radio, and Smart Shuffle are just a few of the ways Spotify brings new music into your ears. To build a Spotify Wrapped that’s full of new and exciting songs, we recommend prioritizing these features earlier in the year. That way the newly discovered songs have plenty of time to populate your Spotify Wrapped 2025.
5
Engage with your music
Give the algorithm a helping hand
Spotify’s algorithms create playlists, add songs to Smart Shuffle, and decide what appears on your home screen. The overall goal is to bring you music that you’ll probably like, but its accuracy is debatable. These recommendations are built on your listening habits, but that’s not the entire story.
According to Spotify, liking songs, following artists, and saving tracks to your playlists improve Spotify’s recommendations. It’s much like any other social media algorithm; the more you engage with one type of content, the more of it you’ll see (in theory).
The easiest way to nudge these recommendations is to create playlists. Even if you don’t plan on using them, creating short playlists of your favorite songs from individual artists can help guide your recommendations. This builds into our first tip in this article; create playlists earlier in the year so the algorithm has plenty of time to recommend new tracks for you to discover.
4
Regularly explore the Made for You page
Keep your favorite music at the top
Spotify’s Made for You page is found in the Search tab. This page contains a variety of playlists that Spotify has generated for you. Some of these are debatable in quality (looking at you, AI-generated DJ) but others are fantastic ways to dive deeper into your favorite music and artists.
The Made for You Page is a great tool if you’re tired of seeing the same tracks and artists appear on your Wrapped every year, but you rarely find new music worth listening to on the Home tab. If you prefer to cleave tightly to your existing interests, we recommend exploring the Genre Mixes and Artist Mixes playlists. These playlists heavily feature songs you’ve already discovered, but with enough new tracks that you’ll always hear something new.
Made for You is the ideal tool to help you build a Spotify Wrapped for 2025 that showcases your existing favorite music rather than your ability to keep up with the latest chart-toppers.
3
Curate your playlists as you listen
Don’t let playlists ossify
Creating playlists is a great way for Spotify to understand your favorite music, but there’s more you can do with playlists to influence your recommendations. According to Spotify’s Head of Global Music Curation and Discovery, JJ Italiano, Spotify also monitors how you listen and interact with music within your playlists to influence your recommendations.
We also continuously monitor in-playlist performance to understand what tracks and artists users are responding to
So even if you’ve liked a song and added it to a couple of playlists, there’s more you can do. Removing songs from playlists, hiding songs, moving songs further ahead in your queue, and creating song radios can all influence your recommendations. An easy way to put this tip into action is to never leave a playlist as it was when you started listening to it. If you don’t want to remove songs, use the Hide Song option to stop them from playing.
2
Create a playlist built on old Wrapped playlists
Forge your own Repeat Rewind
If there are old Wrapped playlists you’re particularly proud of, head back and draw from them to create your own Wrapped (If you’ve been listening to Spotify since 2016, next year you can draw ten songs from each year to create your top ten songs over ten years!). Not only is this a great way to rediscover past favorites, but this playlist serves as a fantastic way for Spotify to recommend new songs.
Try drawing ten songs from past Wrapped playlists, then using Smart Shuffle and Recommended Songs to bring the total up to 100 songs. This custom Wrapped playlist is now the perfect foundation to build your 2025 Spotify Wrapped. Use the tips we’ve mentioned earlier in this article, and create a Spotify Wrapped that’s built on your favorite music.
1
Use Stats.fm to keep an eye on your listening habits
Identify embarrassing trends before they begin
Stats.fm is a more detailed and regular version of Spotify Wrapped. You can see your listening trends, top songs from custom time periods, and various listening stats. While it doesn’t have the same cultural resonance as Spotify Wrapped, it’s the ideal tool to spot embarrassing trends before they are permanently engraved in your 2025 Wrapped.
Once you’ve set up Stats.fm, check your listening habits regularly. We recommend setting the date range from January 1 onwards to match what Spotify tracks for your Spotify Wrapped. Stats.fm is good for a lot more than curating your Spotify Wrapped, we recommend using it regardless of how much you care about what your Wrapped will look like.
Spotify Wrapped can reveal embarrassing truths or cool habits
While Spotify Wrapped is meant to show off your listening habits, it’s easily manipulated. For example, accidentally leaving a song on repeat overnight can permanently disfigure your Wrapped. So we won’t blame you if you want to curate your 2025 Spotify Wrapped, but as we’ve shown, there are plenty of ways to guide, not force, Spotify towards the tracks you want to share with your friends and family.
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