This previous December, Spotify launched the annual “Wrapped” characteristic for his or her customers. Every consumer’s listening habits have been captured and condensed into a customized and simply shareable compilation that highlighted their prime artists, most-played songs, and whole listening time in a year-long retrospective. Spotify has been providing this characteristic to customers for a decade, in addition to advertising and marketing it to artists and labels as a technique to monitor worldwide developments in style and listening habits.
For 2024, although, Spotify used Google’s NotebookLM to supply a free customized podcast based mostly on a consumer’s “Wrapped” outcomes. Though AI had already been built-in into sure markets with Spotify’s AI DJ, this customized podcast was a brand new characteristic. It took Spotify Wrapped one step additional, shifting past social media photographs and TikTok-ready movies by including two voices who’ve a minutes-long dialog in regards to the consumer—you.
This customized podcast faucets into present listening developments. In keeping with Edison Analysis’s 2024 Infinite Dial report, roughly 100 million individuals in america alone hearken to podcasts frequently. Nearly 50% of these over 12 years of age have listened to not less than one podcast within the final month. Podcast reveals and hosts cowl all the pieces: true crime, parenting, present occasions, the Inklings, and even hour-long explorations of Supreme Courtroom instances. Over the last American presidential election, each main social gathering candidates have been visitors on completely different podcasts, reaching thousands and thousands of listeners per episode.
As a substitute of the intimacy that comes from a friendship wherein pursuits are shared and mentioned, you’re merely left listening to your smartphone alone.
Maybe the attraction of podcasts lies in specificity: the subject at-hand is set by every listener’s personal distinctive decisions. Need to hear your favourite movie star’s view on a present occasion? Want recommendations on navigating the trendy relationship scene? There are podcasts for that. With the Spotify Wrapped podcast, nonetheless, the subject selection turns into particularly distinctive and private. Now, the subject is a retrospective of you: your musical tastes, your listening habits, and your style preferences.
The voices focus on your favourite style, which could possibly be one thing as particular as “Viking Vocal Acapella,” and speculate on what you may need been doing on the day with essentially the most collected listening minutes. (In my very own podcast, they speculated that Might fifteenth’s great amount of listening time meant I went on a highway journey when, the truth is, my kids had the abdomen flu and wanted distraction.) These voices, female and male, focus on the individuality of your listening tastes based mostly on rankings, which could lead you to consider {that a} favourite artist should know you’re one in every of their prime followers.
However the reputation of podcasts goes past subject option to the type as effectively. As podcast hosts converse with one another and/or interview visitors, they have an inclination to create an off-the-cuff, intimate format that enables the listener to really feel included within the dialog. Spotify’s AI-generated voices actually sound genuine and conversational. They interrupt one another, ask one another questions, have emotional inflections, and maybe, most significantly, focus on you. Some feedback from my very own podcast included “Your musical journey this yr was unbelievable!” and “It actually reveals the way you understood their music.”
By the act of listening to themselves being mentioned and praised, the consumer feels understood and a part of an intimate group. Absolutely these are buddies who know me, proper? (Fahrenheit 451’s depiction of an insipid Mildred speaking to her parlor partitions immediately turns into rather more sympathetic.)
Spotify Wrapped podcasts actually showcase the advances of AI. Extra importantly, although, their reputation highlights the rising loneliness epidemic. American adults are more and more remoted with fewer social connections, which suggests fewer friendships. The U.S. Surgeon Common has identified the damaging implications to this lack of connection, as has social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his bestselling ebook The Anxious Technology.
At first pay attention, the AI-created podcast appears remarkably much like how C. S. Lewis imagines early human discussions in The 4 Loves. He describes friendship discovered within the recollection of occasions, “the submit mortem” completed in an effort to “draw conclusions for future use.” Lewis writes: “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or extra of the companions uncover that they’ve in widespread some perception or curiosity and even style which the others don’t share and which, til that second, every believed to be his personal distinctive treasure (or burden).”
Spotify’s AI-generated podcast tries to implement this sense by an curiosity in you, which is shared between “buddies” since you’re so distinctive in your musical tastes. However as a substitute of the intimacy that comes from a friendship wherein pursuits are shared and mentioned, you’re merely left listening to your smartphone alone.
Listening to this pretend dialog about preferences and unseen moments can depart you feeling such as you’re staring into the Mirror of Erised. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore warns Harry that the Mirror reveals the gazer the “deepest and extra determined want of [their] hearts,” leaving them incapable of constructing choices and even shifting. As a substitute, they yearn just for what’s seen within the mirror. Their lives will cross them by as they lengthy for that which can’t be realized.
We lengthy to be recognized and understood, to bask within the heat of buddies. As a substitute, Spotify leaves us with the picket interruptions of AI-generated voices repeating that which we already know: ourselves.
