As a gift for your birthday, your music algorithm for 2024 will be tightly wrapped with a bow. For many Spotify users around the world, late November and early December are another reason to celebrate. Now that we can have millions of songs in our pockets every day, we have all the more reason to see an accurate analysis of our annual music review. But how exactly does Spotify collect this data and tailor our algorithms to our ever-changing tastes in musical vibrations?

As a global company and streaming platform, Spotify achieves more than just that 180 countries. The service, which was released publicly in 2008, has overtaken every other way to listen to music. With the aim of “frictionless music experience for listeners”, Spotify employees have spent countless hours receiving quality customer feedback regarding desired streaming preferences. This is what has made Spotify the dominant figure among all other streaming platforms and taken over the music world.

Spotify officially named Wrapped their end-of-year music analytics for users in 2016, but it didn’t become popular until the feature was added to the app. Before 2019, users could only access their personalized music year via the website. What really revolutionized Wrapped, however, was intern Jewel Ham’s story concept inspired interactivity between listeners and different functions. To dig deeper into what Spotify Wrapped really is, we take a look at its summary analysis, popular music predictions for 2024, and how algorithms adapt throughout the year.

Employees continuously update users’ packaged summaries with several widgets per year. In 2023, Spotify listeners received a personalized character card linked to their music (“Me in 2023”), their perfect city match (“Sound City”), along with their top five most listened to genres and artists, and a top five artist message. They also get in-depth data analysis of the number of artists and genres listened to, and how many minutes spent in total.

It is not surprising that Taylor Swift, in conjunction with one of the most successful tours of our century, was the most listened to artist last year. She was followed by Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake and Peso Pluma who shared the stage. In Rowan Davies’ article for TechRadarexpects to see similar trends to last year, with Taylor Swift joining Troye Sivan, Charlie XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan in the top five. Recognition for many of these artists skyrocketed for a variety of reasons, such as virality on TikTok, the release of hit albums, and popular collaborations. While each of these artists achieved greater fame, it is a strong prediction that they will top the Spotify charts in Wrapped.

While there were rumors and concerns about Spotify’s unofficial ‘deadline’ to stop analyzing trends after October 31, Spotify treat. However, they continue the mystery of the ambiguous deadline for summarizing the packed data. The upside is that there’s no reason to worry about completely adjusting your Wrapped results on Halloween.

But that means Spotify tracks your normal music listening habits all year round and suggests new music based on your personalized algorithm. The bandits for recommendations as treatments is an AI system designed to recommend previously listened to songs, as well as new songs with similar styles. It solves each user’s algorithm trend with a similarity/distance formula as shown below:

This particular equation is known as the Euclidean formula used to calculate the direct distance between two points, in this case the distance between your music preferences and those of others. Each person’s preferences are analyzed through the different playlists they create, the songs they skip (and how long someone listens to a song before skipping it), and the location they listen to.

Think about the songs you listen to. Spotify then categorizes your music tastes into four broad groups, clustering artists and music into genres: country, jazz, classic rock, and folk. Each of your songs will be placed into these categories, ranked based on how extreme a song represents a specific genre. This is considered one t-SNE algorithm to map each number into a two-dimensional latent space.

After analyzing the audio data of the songs people listen to, The BaRT uses the 30 second rule to distract from a listener’s enjoyment of featured music. If they listen for more than thirty seconds before skipping, Spotify will continue to suggest similar songs. The same goes for how much time you spend on a playlist: the longer you listen, the more Spotify will recommend songs from a similar category.

Finally, Spotify takes into account the personal information users share, such as location, language and age. These demographics play a clear role in understanding what is or is not preferred by a specific local speaker, speaker or generation. For example, if French is your chosen language on Spotify, the algorithm will give you more French music recommendations.

Even though we play an influential role in the music we listen to – and which will contribute to our Wrapped each year – Spotify continually tracks our preferences with data analytics tools. By using collaborative, content-based and language filteringSpotify introduces us to old favorites and new songs we may not have listened to before. As the icing on the cake, our custom Wrapped profiles encourage us to set new personal bests with our listening habits at the end of the year.

As a Spotify user, you would probably like to see your music trend analysis for 2024. Now that you’ve learned a lot about the complex systems and programs Spotify uses to track your preferences, you might enjoy this gift a little more. Spotify is your personal music assistant and provides your music taste with everything you need and more. So while you’re listening to a new song on a bus ride or on your way to class, remember that Spotify sent you this music to enjoy, but don’t be afraid to skip before the thirty seconds are up!