Confused By Your Spotify Wrapped This Year? Spotify Explains How It Picks

Confused by Your Spotify Wrapped This Year? Spotify Explains How It Picks

Last updated: 2025/12/07 at 10:16 AM

News Room Published 7 December 2025

For many, music tastes can be a fairly personal and charged topic. This means that Spotify’s yearly recap feature, Spotify Wrapped, has provoked some pretty aggravated responses from users on social media—whether because they were told their favorite music wasn’t what they expected, or that their listening age was well into retirement territory.

Now, Spotify has rolled out new data explaining exactly how its Wrapped picks are compiled to clear up any confusion.

In a blog post, Spotify explains that Top Songs are ranked by the total number of listens. For Wrapped, a “listen” is only counted when a song has been played for more than 30 seconds. This means that if you’re quickly skipping a song on an album, or get bored after a track’s intro, it’s unlikely to make your end-of-year list. Spotify also explained how it deals with song length in its calculations. The platform counts one stream as one listen, regardless of the song’s length. This means that a two-minute jingle counts just as much toward the ultimate rankings as a full listen to a ten-minute musical odyssey.

Top Artists, in contrast, are treated differently, using what Spotify calls a “weighted stream count.” This means that your top artist for the year might not account for any of your Top Songs if your listening is spread out across multiple songs by that artist rather than concentrated on a few favorites.

Top Albums are calculated differently from tracks or artists. Spotify says it counts an album listen if you’ve streamed the majority of its tracks. This could be from within the album page itself, from playlists, or from any other place on Spotify. Spotify calculates the album score based not only on the total number of streams but also on “how evenly your listening was distributed across the album,” saying this method “best surfaces the albums that truly resonated with you.”

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“Even with the same underlying data, rankings can be created in many different ways,” said a Spotify spokesperson. They explained that each “data story” uses the metric “that makes the most sense for that specific narrative,” which is why some picks highlight total streams while others emphasize minutes listened.

It’s unlikely we’re set to see the end of Spotify Wrapped-style recap features anytime soon. Even organizations far away from the music streaming business, like Wikipedia, have rolled out comparable recap tools during 2025.