2024 has been a year punctuated by pop culture’s fast-moving cycles. Emerging artist Chappell Roan exploded in popularity early in the year. Sabrina Carpenter mainstreamed her pop hits straight into our veins with this summer’s Short n’ Sweet. Charli XCX’s now-iconic album, brat, went beyond music to define an entire generational attitude. This year, “culture [moved] fast from the fringes to the forefront,” says Spotify’s senior director of global marketing Matt Luhks. Now, Wrapped is focusing on how that momentum impacted individual listening habits, by dividing 2024 into a series of personal listening “phases.”

Wrapped now captures your musical eras

In order to capture your listening phases, this year’s Wrapped will focus on a major new feature called Music Evolution. It pulls from a database of hundreds of thousands of content descriptors—from genres and artists to plain ‘ol vibes—to assign each user up to three distinct musical eras.

If you listened to a lot of Bad Bunny and Maluma in the summertime, for example, you might’ve been in your “Heatwave Beach Reggaeton” era. Or maybe you couldn’t get enough of Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, in which case your vibe was “Pink Pilates Princess Pop Strut.” In other words, those sad winter playlists might come back to haunt you as an era you’d rather forget—but you can always count on Wrapped’s usual features to share on socials, including your top songs, artists, and minutes listened.

Wrapped’s bolder, new look reflects its new brand

According to Marc Hazan, Spotify’s VP of marketing and partnerships, Spotify Wrapped 2024’s design is meant to reflect this year’s fast-moving music scene. All of the activation’s content uses Spotify Mix, the app’s custom font which debuted earlier this year. The font allows for a much more dynamic range of typography, from ultra-bold line weights to condensed, skinny lettering.

The color palette’s combination of blood red, neon pink, and canary yellow hues is distinctly more dramatic than in past years, which have tended to take a lighter approach.

“The design of the 2024 Wrapped campaign stands apart from anything we’ve done before. It’s bold, vibrant, and high-energy, which parallels the momentum of 2024,” Hazan says. “This was a year of transformation for Spotify’s brand identity, and I see Wrapped as the visible culmination of that work, reflecting a more expressive and open Spotify at the center of culture.”

Additional, first-time Spotify Wrapped features

Beyond the Music Evolution breakdown, this year will also see another brand new personalized Wrapped feature: a custom AI-generated podcast. Through a partnership with Google’s NotebookLM, Spotify will collate each user’s history into a multi-part podcast narrated by a male and female “host”—and, surprisingly, the audio doesn’t veer into uncanny valley territory. For a limited time, users will be able to download their podcast audio clip and share it with friends and across socials.

“With this personalized audio overview, you can dive deeper into your music listening—including things like top songs, top artists, and top genres,” says Molly Holder, Spotify’s senior director of product personalization, noting that the podcast will include additional details like the inspiration behind some of your top tracks.

The AI podcast is a clever way for Spotify to emphasize its existing AI features, which have become increasingly prominent on the app over the past year. Last year, Spotify launched its AI DJ, a tool that uses generative AI to serve up custom playlists and recommendations based on a user’s history. This September, Spotify also expanded a feature which allows Premium members to enter a text prompt and receive an AI-generated playlist (like, for example, “Give me a playlist that will make me feel like a main character.”)

For the first time, Wrapped will include a recap of year-end audiobook listening data to users and authors alike, perhaps giving avid readers a new debate format aside from Goodreads comments. This of course also gives Spotify a new opportunity to promote its (relatively) new audiobook section: The app added audiobooks to its repertoire back in late 2022, and now hosts a catalog of over 300,000 titles.

The ultimate marketing play

For Spotify, Wrapped is the most pivotal brand moment of the year. In 2023, over 227 million users across 170 markets engaged with the activation. Now, the company is increasingly leaning into its beloved tradition as a brand messaging platform. The new Music Evolution feature is one piece of that.

“There is no other marketing campaign in the world that fans demand like Wrapped,” Hazan says. “It’s a major focus for us every year.”