This past December, Spotify released the annual “Wrapped” feature for their users. Each user’s listening habits were captured and condensed into a personalized and easily shareable compilation that highlighted their top artists, most-played songs, and total listening time in a year-long retrospective. Spotify has been offering this feature to users for a decade, as well as marketing it to artists and labels as a way to track worldwide trends in genre and listening habits.
For 2024, though, Spotify used Google’s NotebookLM to offer a free personalized podcast based on a user’s “Wrapped” results. Although AI had already been integrated into certain markets with Spotify’s AI DJ, this personalized podcast was a new feature. It took Spotify Wrapped one step further, moving beyond social media images and TikTok-ready videos by adding two voices who have a minutes-long conversation about the user—you.
This personalized podcast taps into current listening trends. According to Edison Research’s 2024 Infinite Dial report, approximately 100 million people in the United States alone listen to podcasts on a regular basis. Almost 50% of those over 12 years of age have listened to at least one podcast in the last month. Podcast shows and hosts cover everything: true crime, parenting, current events, the Inklings, and even hour-long explorations of Supreme Court cases. During the last American presidential election, both major party candidates were guests on different podcasts, reaching millions of listeners per episode.
Instead of the intimacy that comes from a friendship in which interests are shared and discussed, you’re simply left alone listening to your smartphone.
Perhaps the appeal of podcasts lies in specificity: the topic at-hand is determined by each listener’s own unique choices. Want to hear your favorite celebrity’s view on a current event? Need tips on navigating the modern dating scene? There are podcasts for that. With the Spotify Wrapped podcast, however, the topic choice becomes especially unique and personal. Now, the topic is a retrospective of you: your musical tastes, your listening habits, and your genre preferences.
The voices discuss your favorite genre, which could be something as specific as “Viking Vocal Acapella,” and speculate on what you might have been doing on the day with the most accumulated listening minutes. (In my own podcast, they speculated that May 15th’s large amount of listening time meant I went on a road trip when, in fact, my children had the stomach flu and needed distraction.) These voices, male and female, discuss the uniqueness of your listening tastes based on rankings, which might lead you to believe that a favorite artist must know you’re one of their top fans.
But the popularity of podcasts goes beyond topic choice to the style as well. As podcast hosts converse with each other and/or interview guests, they tend to create a casual, intimate format that allows the listener to feel included in the conversation. Spotify’s AI-generated voices certainly sound authentic and conversational. They interrupt each other, ask each other questions, have emotional inflections, and perhaps, most importantly, discuss you. Some comments from my own podcast included “Your musical journey this year was incredible!” and “It really shows how you understood their music.”
Through the act of listening to themselves being discussed and praised, the user feels understood and part of an intimate group. Surely these are friends who know me, right? (Fahrenheit 451’s depiction of an insipid Mildred talking to her parlor walls suddenly becomes much more sympathetic.)
Spotify Wrapped podcasts certainly showcase the advances of AI. More importantly, though, their popularity highlights the growing loneliness epidemic. American adults are increasingly isolated with fewer social connections, which means fewer friendships. The U.S. Surgeon General has pointed out the dangerous implications to this lack of connection, as has social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his bestselling book The Anxious Generation.
At first listen, the AI-created podcast seems remarkably similar to how C. S. Lewis imagines early human discussions in The Four Loves. He describes friendship found in the recollection of events, “the post mortem” done in an effort to “draw conclusions for future use.” Lewis writes: “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, til that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).”
Spotify’s AI-generated podcast tries to implement this feeling through an interest in you, which is shared between “friends” because you’re so unique in your musical tastes. But instead of the intimacy that comes from a friendship in which interests are shared and discussed, you’re simply left alone listening to your smartphone.
Listening to this fake conversation about personal tastes and unseen moments can leave you feeling like you’re staring into the Mirror of Erised. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore warns Harry that the Mirror shows the gazer the “deepest and more desperate desire of [their] hearts,” leaving them incapable of making decisions or even moving. Instead, they yearn only for what is seen in the mirror. Their lives will pass them by as they long for that which can not be realized.
We long to be known and understood, to bask in the warmth of friends. Instead, Spotify leaves us with the wooden interruptions of AI-generated voices repeating that which we already know: ourselves.
