It’s worse than you think. Forget the lack of fun facts, the snooze-worthy stats. Something evil is going on under the surface.

It’s been long enough. Spotify Wrapped 2024 sucked. Where was the music taste based on city, connecting us through art across the globe? Where was the detailed personalities that we could all relate over? 2023 format come back. We forgive your glitchy graphics. Like every big corporation, Spotify mine your data (those pesky Terms & Conditions do mean something, unfortunately). So why didn’t they use their intricate and downright terrifying knowledge of our listening habits?

There’s a reason for it, one that centres around the rise, boom, hype and progress around two unassuming letter: AI. Spotify would rather use AI features than provide a creative, considered and unique yearly wrap-up. Indeed, artists have reacted with their new disdain for the app. For example, though Caroline Polachek still uses the app, she took to her Instagram story to share tips on how to work against it’s algorithm that encourages and exacerbates a sonic echo chamber, after stating she will “probably stop using it next year.”

It’s also called business innovation and partnership. The AI Podcast that Spotify offered alongside the yearly Wrapped section in which “2 AI hossts dive into your year in music,” was introduced by an unsuspecting, but secretly important, clause: “for the first time ever.” For the first time ever, we’ve changed the game, said Spotify. Google’s NotebookLM was used for this product. Right there is an expensive business partnership smiling smugly back at you. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t really matter. Other corporations do. As a strategic business move, this is ingenious.

Let me tell you something about AI, though, which Spotify seemed to have forgotten. It can be wrong. In the case of my AI podcast, there were all sorts of clunky, cringe-worthy errors made by the two dehumanized voices who tried, but failed, to replicate modern idioms: “you were really in your music era this year, for sure,” the female voice said. Whilst not wrong, the emotionless tone made that a stupid, not a silly and light-hearted, comment.

Personal reveal: my top artist was Charli XCX, so the “podcast hosts” decided to delve into what this meant for my year. In doing so, they discussed her collaborations with the likes of, sure, Taylor Swift. Girl, have I missed something? There are so many other artists they could have picked. So many. All Taylor Swift and Charli XCX have is unconfirmed beef on track ‘Sympathy is a Knife.’

“Wow, you listened to the most music on August 9th!” those deliriously annoying AI voices mused, “I wonder if you were at a concert, or something…” Why, pray tell, would I be listening to Spotify if I was at a live gig? The tranlsation of the digital into the real is something AI here failed to comprehend. Oh, the irony. Do these roboid voices not have any tangible human experiences thus use largely biased and often unethical datasets to identify meaningless patterns that try (and often fail) to replicate a digitised ideal of humanness, or something? Oh, wait… A flashing yellow, “Try NotebookLM” beckons below. Stop. Make it stop.

This series of unfortunate events isn’t the only reason Spotify sucked. A largely unknown, yet salient, fact about AI is that, left unchecked it will, put simply, destroy the planet. The data centres needed to power the processing capabilities of AI use a mammoth amount of energy. The Data Centre magazine predicted that the global AI boom will triple EU data centre energy use by 2030. @commonsearth on Instagram noted that, “by 2027, AI usage alone is predicted to use as much water as all of New Zealand”. Net zero ambitions hang in the balance. Get used to the disappointment of content ripped from human creativity and thrust into these cold, dead hands. I suspect this is just the beginning.