It’s finally that time of the year! And no we’re not talking about the festive season, we mean the celebration of Spotify Wrapped!

December 1 marks the release of the iconic, highly anticipated annual Spotify Wrapped campaign where over 381 million listeners subscribed to the streaming platform can see their unique listening trends for the year.

The campaign consists of snazzy and shareable customised infographics summing up your top artists, songs, playlist, podcasts, and genres, as well as the total number of minutes spent listening on the app.

Other features of the personalised campaign include:

• 2021: The Movie – Pairs Spotify listener’s top songs with typical scenes from a movie that’s about you 
• Your Audio Aura – Spotify worked with an aura expert to visualise listener’s audio aura based on your top two music moods
• Playing Cards – An interactive game of ‘two truths and a lie’ based on each Spotify listener’s personal listening data 
• 2021 Wrapped Blend – a feature that allows Spotify listeners create a blended playlist with their friends and see how their 2021 music tastes match up

So who and what did the world listen to the most this year?

For the second year in a row, Peuorto Rican rapper Bad Bunny was Spotify’s most listened to artist of the year, with more than 9.1 billion streams.

Both the second most streamed artist, and most streamed female artist of the year was Taylor Swift, followed by BTS, Drake, and Justin Bieber.

18-year-old Olivia Rodrigo took the world by storm this year with her song ‘drivers license’ the first most streamed song on Spotify and ‘good 4 u‘ the fourth.

Not only that, but the young star’s debut album SOUR was also the number one most streamed album of the year.

Other than being a music streaming platform, Spotify has also become a home for podcasts, with the most popular being The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, Crime Junkie, TED Talks Daily, and The Daily

But whilst today may be a day worth celebrating for Spotify users, those subscribed to rival Apple Music are experiencing serious FOMO.

As Spotify listeners enjoy personlised interactive quizzes, audio auras and show-off-able infographics, Apple Music listeners just get a playlist with their top songs of the year.

The mediocre version of the Spotify Wrapped experience is a part of Apple Music’s Replay feature that launched in 2021.

And this isn’t to say that the $2.79 trillion company doesn’t have the facilities to collect data to make a personalised experience for their millions of listeners. 

Spotify has actually launched an entire campaign dedicated to Apple’s ‘unfairness’ where they believe Apple to be monopolising consumer’s listening devices (aka their iPhones) to benefit the Apple Music listening experience over Spotify’s.

Alas, the rivalry between Spotify and Apple Music continues… so who’s side are you on?