Spotify turns Wrapped 2025 into a game

Spotify’s year-end tradition has always been a celebration of personal listening habits — a colorful, data-filled snapshot of what defined your soundtrack over the past twelve months. Wrapped 2025 sticks to that winning formula, but this time the company is adding a competitive spark. The familiar stats are still present: your most-played track, the total hours you spent listening, your top artist, and a personalized playlist collecting your 100 most-heard songs — now marked with how many spins each one received. But alongside these staples comes a suite of new features designed to transform passive listening into a surprisingly social, and sometimes hilarious, contest.

The biggest addition is Wrapped Party, an interactive challenge where you and your friends compare listening habits to determine who truly deserves the crown of most devoted — or most eccentric — music fan. It isn’t a game you “play” in real time; instead, the results reflect everything you’ve already listened to throughout the year. There’s no way to jump back in time to rack up more minutes with an obscure ambient track or binge a library of unsettling horror audiobooks simply to outdo your friends. Still, the idea of turning a year’s worth of listening into a playful rivalry gives Wrapped a competitive dimension it has never really explored before.

Wrapped Party hands out individual “trophies” based on specific traits in your audio habits. If you gravitate toward gut-wrenching ballads, you may be honored with “The Onion Chopper.” If you’re the person in your friend group who single-handedly keeps chaotic genre-hopping playlists alive, there’s bound to be an award for that too. But the feature also looks at group dynamics. Your collective profile can range from “Copy and Paste,” awarded when everyone’s taste is eerily identical, to “Chaos Crew,” a label reserved for circles of friends who somehow share no overlapping artists at all. It’s a lighthearted way of reflecting how music connects — or divides — people.

Alongside Wrapped Party, Spotify is reviving some interactive components from previous editions. The song quiz returns, letting you test how well you recognize your most-played tracks, and the top artist sprint visualizes the shifting hierarchy of your five favorite artists from month to month. What’s genuinely new this year is Spotify’s focus on albums. For the first time, Wrapped highlights full-length records rather than only songs, artists, or genres — a nod to listeners who still treat albums as cohesive artistic statements rather than a collection of singles to be shuffled. Wrapped 2025 also broadens its scope beyond music entirely, shining a spotlight on your most-listened-to audiobook genres.

Two additional features aim to make your Wrapped feel more expressive — and a bit more revealing. The first is Clubs, a stylistic reframing of your dominant genre. Instead of simply telling you that metal topped your listening chart, Spotify places you in something like the Grit Collective, a group said to “believe in rebellion through music.” It also assigns you a role reflecting your listening patterns: for instance, a “Scout” if you tend to discover rising artists before they break into the mainstream. It’s a playful spin on genre identity, turning what used to be a static stat into a more imaginative storytelling device.

Then there’s Listening Age, which humorously exposes the generational vibe of your audio choices. By analyzing the eras from which your favorite tracks originate, Spotify gives you a “musical age.” You may be well into adulthood but listening like a teenager obsessed with 2025’s new releases — or, conversely, you may be 38 with the sonic profile of someone in their seventies. If your playlists are dominated by late ’90s Nu Metal, expect your Listening Age to land somewhere in your early forties. It’s a light, self-aware reminder that nostalgia — or trend-chasing — knows no real age limit.

Although Spotify wasn’t the first to roll out its annual recap this season — Apple Replay, Amazon Delivered, and YouTube Music Recap all arrived earlier — Wrapped remains the most elaborate and culturally dominant of the bunch. Its combination of data visualization, humor, and now outright competition continues to make it a social media phenomenon. Wrapped 2025 reinforces that reputation, turning a personal listening summary into a communal event that’s part scoreboard, part identity check, and part celebration of the music (and audiobooks) that shaped the year.