Spotify Wrapped has officially arrived. We listen to music all year round, and Spotify remembers all of it, painstakingly tracking your favorite songs, artists, and other music trends throughout the year, and providing fun images to share on social media to let everyone know about your obsession with They will.

But this year, Wrapped has a new trick up its sleeve. AI-generated podcasts that analyze your music preferences: AI voices, male and female, provided by NotebookLM, will look through your Wrapped and talk about the bands and songs you listen to most often.

As you can imagine, it's weird. Listening to two almost human voices talk about how you spent the last year is a different feeling than watching a nicely animated video in a traditional Wrapped.

Thankfully, this podcast is short. My podcast is just over 3 minutes long (here's a link if you want to hear me talk about my music), which is about the same amount of time it takes to go through a traditional Spotify Wrapped package. That's because the AI basically repeats everything you've already read in a more conversational tone.

I was expecting an analysis, which the main feature does not provide. Still, since they are essentially the same, I don't see why this feature exists, other than Spotify wanted to say it included an AI feature (which all companies seem to be doing now).

Except that the information and analysis was not new, the conversation felt fake enough to pull me away from it. As soon as the female AI voice inserted a strange pause into my number one artist of 2024, Dance Gavin Dance, I was off the hook.

The features Spotify has included to make Wrapped stand out are great, but the AI podcast still doesn't feel primetime-worthy; with rapid advances in AI technology, I expect it to be even better next year.

Until then, I'll stick to traditional Wrapped instead of listening to nearly-human AI bots talk about the deathcore, post-hardcore, and other music I love.