Spotify has once again managed to turn its annual year-in-review feature into a global talking point, but for 2025, the conversation is tinged with widespread confusion and irritation. The music streaming giant's latest Wrapped campaign has rolled out a new and perplexing feature dubbed 'Your Listening Age', leaving an estimated 700 million listeners baffled and, in many cases, downright enraged.
The Bizarre New 'Listening Age' Feature
Moving on from last year's AI-focused missteps, Spotify's 2025 offering centres on a concept it calls the 'reminiscence bump'. The platform's theory is that people feel most nostalgic for the music they enjoyed between the ages of 16 and 21. To calculate a user's 'Listening Age', Spotify analysed the era of music each person streamed most throughout the year. It then compared these tastes to other users of the same actual age.
The final, often bewildering, number is a reverse-engineered calculation. Essentially, Spotify estimates how old you would be today if you were in that key 16-21 age bracket during the era of music you listened to most. The results, released in early December 2025, have proven to be wildly inaccurate and humorous for many.
High-profile examples include Seven News Perth's Jerrie Demasi, who was assigned a listening age of 100, and Sunrise's Katie Brown, who was deemed to have the musical tastes of a 21-year-old. For everyday users, the feature has become a source of frustration rather than the shareable joy Spotify typically aims for.
A History of Viral Controversy
Spotify Wrapped has evolved from a simple data summary into a major cultural event, deliberately designed to generate social media buzz. Each year, the platform seeks novel ways to repackage user metrics, ensuring the campaign trends online. Users eagerly post their results, either to showcase their curated taste or to own up to a guilty pleasure.
However, the 2024 campaign was heavily criticised for its over-reliance on artificial intelligence. Many found the insights lacking and the presentation confusing, particularly a strange AI-generated 'podcast' about each user's habits. Another feature, 'Music Evolution', described monthly listening patterns in near-incomprehensible terms like 'Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop'.
The 2025 'Listening Age' feature continues this trend of ambitious, but arguably flawed, innovation. It demonstrates Spotify's rare talent for uniting its vast user base in collective bewilderment on a yearly basis.
Who Actually Benefits from Wrapped?
Amidst the uproar, a select group of listeners has found genuine satisfaction. These are the users who made it into the elite top 0.01 per cent of Taylor Swift listeners globally—a badge of honour for dedicated 'Swifties' and a legitimate achievement given the artist's monumental fanbase.
For the rest, the Wrapped experience in 2025 has been defined by a questionable age assessment that feels more like a gimmick than genuine insight. While the campaign undeniably succeeds in getting people talking, the conversation this year is less about musical discovery and more about algorithmic absurdity.
As the dust settles on the 2025 Wrapped release, the question remains: will Spotify learn from this backlash, or will it find another bizarrely inventive way to captivate and confound its audience in 2026?
