Wrapped and Ready: What Spotify rolled out for this year’s recap

Spotify Wrapped 2025 introduces Listening Age, Top Albums, play counts, and Fan Leaderboard, making the annual tradition more personal, fun, and a little more revealing for users worldwide.

You can tell the year is ending when Mariah Carey starts defrosting, resolutions start floating in your head, and everyone begins refreshing their Spotify homepage waiting for Wrapped. People have been impatient for days, and now that it has arrived, it feels like Spotify has tried to make amends for last year’s frustrations.

What’s New This Year

The most talked about addition is the Listening Age. It compares the release years of the songs you listen to with the listening habits of people in your actual age group. It has immediately become the internet’s favourite part of Wrapped because it is a straightforward indicator of taste, nostalgia and sometimes denial.

Another noticeable upgrade is the inclusion of Top Albums. For years, people have been streaming full albums, but Wrapped never acknowledged it. This year, it finally does, and it gives a fuller picture of the artists or moods that carried you through the year. Spotify also added the exact number of times you played your top songs. This feels small, but it has completely changed how people read their Wrapped. The usual “I swear I only heard this twice” reaction is harder to maintain when the app tells you the real number.

The Top Song Quiz is one of the lighter additions. It is quick and gamified, as most of Wrapped already is. The Wrapped Clubs feature, which places users into listening style categories, is pleasant to look at but has not made a major impact in conversation. The Fan Leaderboard lets you see how you rank in the top percentile of listeners for an artist and has become a new form of pride and, for some, mild concern.  And finally, the Listening Archive gives you a month-by-month look at your listening phases, which feels like seeing all the versions of you that existed in 2025.

How People Are Reacting

People genuinely appreciate that the 2025 Wrapped gives them information that feels relevant and easy to track, a shift from last year’s disappointment. The memes are arriving at their usual pace. And the perennial annual complaint has already resurfaced, the “This is not my Wrapped” insistence from people convinced the app has mixed up their results. Wrapped remains a mirror people enjoy looking into but never fully trust.

spotify listening age gap relationship— fawn (@fawnncel) December 3, 2025

A Small Asterisk*

Wrapped is still one of the internet’s most harmless and cheerful traditions, but it does come with a small asterisk. Behind the neon slides is an enormous amount of behavioural data: your moods, phases, obsessions, and late-night spirals quietly sorted and packaged back to you. Every part of Wrapped, from the rankings to the quizzes, turns private habits into something meant to be shared. It is still enjoyable, but it also reminds us how seamlessly tech platforms can turn private moments into public content, and how the culture around sharing these results has slowly made listening feel a little performative.

spotify the only tech company to figure out how to successfully rebrand "we've been tracking you" to "isn't this FUN"— delia (@delia_cai) December 1, 2021

Even with this contradiction, Wrapped remains the same silly end-of-the-year ritual it has always been. A slightly embarrassing, strangely revealing and surprisingly comforting digital scrapbook of the year. Or at least the version of the year that Spotify reflects to you.