Every year, Spotify Wrapped offers a personalized look back at the audio that defined your year. It’s a snapshot of your listening habits, designed to tell the story of your year in sound. And sometimes, that story can hold a few surprises.
There are many valid ways to rank listening habits, and at Spotify, our data scientists work hard to land on the methods that best reflect what resonates with our users. We spend the entire year experimenting with methodologies, listening to user feedback, and internally testing the experience ourselves to build conviction that Wrapped feels as personal as possible.
If your top song wasn’t what you expected, or you’re wondering why a certain artist landed at number one, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the data is defined and calculated.
It’s all about the methodology
Even with the same underlying data, rankings can be created in many different ways. For Wrapped, we choose the method that we believe best reflects what users care most about. Each data story uses the metric that makes the most sense for that specific narrative, which is why some stories highlight total streams while others feature minutes listened.
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- Top Songs are ranked by the total number of listens. For Wrapped, a “listen” is counted once a track has been played for more than 30 seconds. One stream is one listen, regardless of whether the song is three minutes or 10 minutes long.
- Top Artists, on the other hand, are ranked by a weighted stream count. This means primary artists receive more weight than secondary or featured artists on a track. And your top artist might not always dominate your Top Songs list if your listening is spread across many of their songs, with each one only streamed a few times.
- Top Albums have their own unique logic. We count an album listen if you’ve streamed the majority of its tracks, whether from the album page, within playlists, or any other place on Spotify. From there, we calculate a score based not only on the total number of streams but also on how evenly your listening was distributed across the album. Through testing, we’ve found this method best surfaces the albums that truly resonated with you.
Not all streams are created equal
Your Wrapped is designed to be a reflection of your taste, not a historical record of every second you streamed. To achieve this, we have a few key rules:
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- Stream definition: The way a “stream” is counted can differ across services. For Wrapped, a play is counted once you’ve listened for more than 30 seconds.
- Cut-off period: Wrapped captures your listening from January 1 until mid November. We do this to ensure we have enough time to check the data and get everything ready for launch day. This is different from some third-party services that may use a full calendar year or a rolling 12-month window.
- Content filtering: We filter out certain non-music tracks (like white noise or nature sounds) as best we can to better reflect your musical taste. We also respect your privacy and your control over your data. Streams from Private Mode or from songs and playlists you’ve excluded from your Taste Profile don’t shape your taste-based stories. Again, this is a different approach from some third-party services.
- Offline listening: Unlike some services that can only import a limited number of offline plays, your Wrapped includes all of your offline listening.
If you’re looking to shape what appears in your next Wrapped, using Private Mode for certain listening sessions and using the “exclude from Taste Profile” feature is the best way to do it.
The human element
Sometimes, the biggest surprise in our data is our own memory. The year is long, and it’s easy to forget that album you had on repeat back in February. Artists with large catalogs can also rack up a high stream count even if you only listened to each song a few times.
And, of course, there’s always the possibility of a shared device. If you and a family member, partner, or roommate all use a smart speaker or home system, their listening habits might have found their way into your results.
At the end of the day, Wrapped is a celebration of your year in listening, and we hope this look at the data helps you connect with your results in a new way.
Explore your personalized 2025 Wrapped and learn more about this year’s campaign and experience on our 2025 Wrapped hub.
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