Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped campaign has officially launched, once again transforming personal listening data into a global cultural event. This year, the platform promises “a bigger and bolder Wrapped experience that is more captivating, more layered, and more revealing than ever before,” strengthening Wrapped’s role as a benchmark for brand storytelling and fan engagement.
Wrapped 2025 builds on the familiar format listeners anticipate each year, but expands the experience with nearly a dozen new storylines. Users can now move through their Wrapped experience at their own pace, revisit moments, and explore added layers of insight that reveal how their listening shaped their year.
The Audio Landscape That Defined 2025
This year’s global rankings reaffirm some of music’s most influential forces. Bad Bunny is once again crowned the world’s most-streamed artist, surpassing 19.8 billion streams and securing his fourth Global Top Artist title. On the songs front, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars dominated globally with “Die With A Smile,” which amassed more than 1.7 billion streams. Bad Bunny also clinched the year’s top album with DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.
Podcast listening remained consistent, with The Joe Rogan Experience taking the global top spot for the sixth consecutive year. And in audiobooks, Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing emerged as the most-streamed title among Premium users. In a meaningful evolution, audiobooks are now officially integrated into Wrapped, giving listeners Top Audiobook, Top Genre and Author Clips for the first time.
A More Personal Wrapped Experience
Spotify has reimagined several of its classic Wrapped stories, including Top Genres, the Top Song Quiz and the Top Artist Sprint, while introducing new features such as Listening Age, a first-time look at how users’ favourite release eras compare to others in their age group. Top Albums also makes its Wrapped debut, emphasising how albums continue to anchor listening behaviour even in a playlist-driven world. Audiobook engagement receives a deeper spotlight as well, with a new narrative dedicated to each listener’s top audiobook genre.
Wrapped as a Cultural Event
Beyond the in-app experience, Wrapped continues to scale far beyond the screen. Spotify’s 2025 campaign expands into artist-focused pop-ups, large-scale OOH placements and bespoke activations across global cities. This year’s rollout is already breaking records: 2025 Wrapped reached 200 million engaged users in just 24 hours, a 19% year-over-year increase and the fastest performance in Wrapped history.
To better understand the creative thinking, strategy, and design decisions behind this year’s Wrapped experience, we spoke with Rasmus Wängelin, Global Head of Brand Design at Spotify and Jeremy Wirth, Global Head of Creative at Spotify, who brought the campaign to life.
In our conversation below, they share the creative inspiration behind the design, the new features, creative risks involved, the ideas that shaped its visual identity, and the results Wrapped 2025 have received within the first 24 hours of going live.
What inspired the design for this year’s Wrapped?
Rasmus Wängelin: We drew a lot of inspiration from the DIY audio culture of the ‘80s, ‘90s and early 2000s – a time before streaming when music lovers made their own culture. Mixtapes and burned CDs were not just playlists; they were tiny personal worlds, crafted track by track, decorated with doodles, photocopy textures, stickers, cutouts and handwriting. Each one looked and sounded like its maker. It was imperfect, expressive and full of personality.
How early does the design team get involved in conceptualising Wrapped each year?
Rasmus Wängelin: The design team gets involved almost immediately. Wrapped is a year-long effort, and planning for the next edition begins as soon as we launch the previous one. Because so much of the company contributes to Wrapped, the design foundation needs to be in place early so everyone has a clear creative direction to build toward. Our process starts with broad exploration. We look at cultural shifts and the feeling of the year, but we intentionally avoid chasing visual trends. Instead, we search for an idea that feels timeless, human and scalable across every touchpoint. Once that direction emerges, we shape the full art direction, motion language and toolkit.
This year introduced new features like Listening Age, the Podcaster Clip, Listening Archive, and Wrapped Party. What drove the decision to push personalisation even further from a design perspective?
Rasmus Wängelin: Wrapped has always been about the people listening and the way audio connects us across borders and timezones. That mix of universality and individuality is what makes the experience feel so personal. As features like Listening Age, the Listening Archive, Your Podcaster Clip and Wrapped Party came to life, our design goal was to make those insights feel even more reflective of the user.
What was the design thinking behind this year’s out-of-home placements, and how did you ensure they felt personal to Wrapped?
Rasmus Wängelin: Our approach to OOH this year was to take the deeply personal tone of Wrapped and scale it into a public, cultural space. Even though OOH is big and loud, we wanted it to feel like it was speaking directly to real listeners and real moments in locations that were meaningful to them. For example, Chappell Roan’s takeover of the New York City subway or Lady Gaga’s monster claw on Copacabana Beach (true fans will understand why both of those places are so special). We focused on clear, bold statements rooted in actual listening data, written in a way that feels human, a little cheeky and unmistakably Wrapped. The goal was for anyone walking by to instantly recognize themselves or their community in the work.
You can see that in moments like Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter was streamed by more than 23M men this year. And for Bad Bunny, our 2025 Global Top Artist, we pushed even further. We created a global short film and a large-scale OOH system designed to be a love letter to Puerto Rico and to the fans who lifted him to the top (again, true fans will recognize the Sapo Concho toad featured in the film). This included installations across San Juan, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami and São Paulo, along with fan activations in Bogotá, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris and beyond.
Where did the creative narrative for this year’s Wrapped come from?
Jeremy Wirth: Music is the most unique and personal thing, whether you’re a teenager going to a concert or a family listening to a track in the car. It has to be and feel human. That belief guides one of our core mantras when creating Wrapped: it should never come across as a standard stats dashboard. Instead, it needs to feel personal, distinctive, and like something every listener is excited — even proud — to share. In a time when so many brands are looking to the future for inspiration, we decided to go in the opposite direction, looking back at how people shared music before Wrapped. This is what led us to rooting our creative and visual identity in the world of mixtape culture.
How do you integrate artist voices and creator communities into the creative strategy for Wrapped?
Jeremy Wirth: New this year, we created unique destinations for fans to celebrate the artists that defined 2025. This is happening globally, with about 50 happening in markets around the world, with each one leaning into niche details of each artist and the major moments they’ve had this year. For example, Chappell Roan’s hair took over the New York Subway at Union Square. At that location, we shared listening insights shared by fans in New York – “NYC played “The Subway” by Chappell Roan 240k+ times on release day… and there’s a millimeter of hair for every one.”
What creative risks did the team take in 2025, and what made them worth taking?
Jeremy Wirth: Last year, we heard a mix of positive feedback and, in some areas, ways we could improve. That feedback reinforced just how much our users love Wrapped, and like we do with all experiences and products, we take that input seriously. That being said, we think fans are getting our most innovative, exciting, and action-packed Wrapped yet. We’re giving them more ways to uncover how they listened with bold design choices, reimagined fan favorite stories, and new interactive features like Wrapped Party.
In 2025, we’ve seen the hard work put into this year’s experience pay off in a huge way. In just 24 hours that 2025 Wrapped debuted, we’ve had 200 million engaged users, a 19% increase YOY. For reference, in 2024, the 200M mark was met in 62 hours, making this the fastest Wrapped in history to reach this milestone.
Beyond reach and impressions, how do you define “success” for Wrapped?
Jeremy Wirth: For me, the success of a campaign like Wrapped is the ability to bring fans closer to the artists they love and vice versa. These fan to artist and fan to creator connections are beyond any business metric success.
