Spotify Lets Users Create AI Podcast for Yearly ‘Wrapped’ Offering

For Spotify users, the end of the year means the arrival of “Wrapped” season.

That’s when the digital audio platform offers members a statistical breakdown of their listening habits for the previous year: the artist they streamed the most, their most-listened song, the types of music they liked.

This year, Spotify announced Wednesday (Dec. 5), the company is doing something different with Wrapped, thanks to an artificial intelligence (AI) partnership with Google. The collaboration lets users employ AI to craft a podcast, with two AI “hosts” from Google’s NotebookLM discussing the users’ year in music.

“With this personalized Audio Overview, fans can immerse themselves in the top songs, artists, and genres that soundtracked their year all delivered using generative AI by two dynamic hosts,” the company wrote on its blog. “From uncovering the unique ways you listened on Spotify to exploring the inspiration behind one of your favorite tracks, Your Spotify Wrapped AI podcast brings you even closer to the music that soundtracked your year.”

According to Google, Spotify crafted the personalized podcasts with the technology powering NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews, “which transforms static information into lively audio conversations.”

Users can access their Wrapped podcast by going to the Wrapped feed on their Spotify homepage and tapping “Your Wrapped AI podcast” to listen.

During Spotify’s quarterly earnings call last month, CEO Daniel Ek noted the company’s expansion of its AI-powered features, such as the AI Playlist, which uses generative AI to curate personalized playlists.

Spotify last year expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to employ advanced AI tools aimed at enhancing the user experience with things like personalized recommendations, based on an analysis of spoken content, such as audiobooks and podcasts.

“Spotify keeps bringing up engagement and keeps bringing down churn,” Ek said. “That is the story we’ve been on. And whenever someone thinks we’ve reached a ceiling, it turns out that we’re finding more ways to drive up the engagement and driving down the churn. And AI is one of those ways. We are very excited about driving our usage of Spotify up over the coming years. AI is a huge unlocking technology that can enable transformational new ways where people want to soundtrack their lives in even more ways than they’ve done in the past.”