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Spotify Wrapped 2021 reads your 'audio aura' and mixes a movie soundtrack to your year

Spotify's annual personalized recap of your music tastes also includes your top 2021 songs, artists, genres and more.

Joan E. Solsman Former Senior Reporter
Joan E. Solsman was CNET's senior media reporter, covering the intersection of entertainment and technology. She's reported from locations spanning from Disneyland to Serbian refugee camps, and she previously wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. She bikes to get almost everywhere and has been doored only once.
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Joan E. Solsman
3 min read
Three phone screens display Spotify user interfaces

Spotify's 2021 Wrapped takes your personal listening data and spins it into games and an "audio aura" reading.

Spotify

Spotify's 2021 Wrapped experiences, which tap into your personal data to recap your musical tastes for the year, launched Wednesday in its mobile apps worldwide. This year's Wrapped includes new features like divining your "audio aura," playing "two truths and a lie" with your 2021 trends and making you the hero of your own movie soundtrack. As usual, the Wrapped experience also sums up your own top artists, genres, songs and podcasts, plus total minutes listened on Spotify

Wrapped is one of Spotify's most popular personalization features, as well as the hook for the company's biggest marketing campaigns of the year. Spotify itself is the world's biggest streaming music service by number of users, providing a pulse of the world's listening habits with its annual recap of the year. 

This year's personal Wrapped experiences include: 

  • Audio Aura -- Spotify enlisted an "aura reader" to visualize your top two music moods of the year.
  • "Two truths and a lie" playing cards -- An interactive data-based game displays three facts about your listening this year. You guess which one is bogus. 
  • 2021: The Movie -- Spotify combed your data to create a movie soundtrack to your life this year, figuring out songs that suit your opening credits, your fight scene, your epic training montage and other cinematic moments. 
  • 2021 Wrapped Blend -- Piggybacking on the Blend playlist feature Spotify launched earlier this year, this compares how your 2021 top music trends matched up with any friends'.

And you can share your Wrapped recap on TikTok this year. A new social-sharing "card" for TikTok joins ones for Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

People reported problems accessing their Wrapped experiences throughout the day of launch. Starting about one hour after Wrapped launched Wednesday, the top three trending Google search queries related to Spotify over the next 24 hours were "Spotify Wrapped something went wrong," "Spotify Wrapped crashing" and "Spotify Wrapped won't load." Down Detector also reported an influx of disruption complaints. 

Spotify declined to comment. 

Disruptions like these can be caused by a variety of factors. A company's servers can be overwhelmed by a surge in traffic, but a memory-intensive experience can also strain some devices' ability to process the demands of an app. 

How to see your Wrapped experience

Wrapped is available only in Spotify's mobile app for Android mobile devices or Apple iPhones or iPads. 

Spotify's Android and iOS mobile apps have banners for Wrapped near the top of the Home tab, where you can enter your personalized Wrapped.  

You can also visit spotify.com/wrapped using your Apple or Android mobile device, which has a button with a deep link that drops you into your Wrapped experience in the app. If you see a button that says "download the app," click on it even if you've already installed the app on your device. (The button's link will simply open the app where you want to be, or it may prompt you to update the app if you haven't done so in a while.) 

If you still can't find your Wrapped, it's possible you haven't used Spotify enough to generate sufficient data to create a personalized experience. For users to be eligible for Wrapped, they must stream at least 30 tracks for more than 30 seconds, as well as stream at least five artists.

2021's top Spotify rankings

Spotify also uses its Wrapped rollout to reveal its rankings for the most-streamed audio on its service this year.

Global most streamed artists 

  1. Bad Bunny
  2. Taylor Swift
  3. BTS
  4. Drake
  5. Justin Bieber

US most streamed artists

  1. Drake
  2. Taylor Swift
  3. Juice WRLD
  4. Kanye West
  5. Bad Bunny

Global most streamed songs 

  1. Drivers license, by Olivia Rodrigo
  2. Montero (Call Me By Your Name), by Lil Nas X
  3. Stay (with Justin Bieber), by The Kid Laroi
  4. Good 4 u, by Olivia Rodrigo
  5. Levitating (featuring DaBaby), by Dua Lipa

US most streamed songs

  1. Drivers license, by Olivia Rodrigo
  2. Good 4 u, by Olivia Rodrigo
  3. Kiss Me More (featuring SZA), by Doja Cat
  4. Heat Waves, by Glass Animals
  5. Levitating, (featuring DaBaby) by Dua Lipa

Global most streamed albums 

  1. Sour, Olivia Rodrigo
  2. Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa
  3. Justice, Justin Bieber
  4. =, Ed Sheeran
  5. Planet Her, Doja Cat

US most streamed albums

  1. Sour, Olivia Rodrigo
  2. Dangerous: The Double Album, Morgan Wallen
  3. Planet Her, Doja Cat
  4. Justice, Justin Bieber
  5. Legends Never Die, Juice WRLD

Global most popular podcasts 

  1. The Joe Rogan Experience
  2. Call Her Daddy
  3. Crime Junkie
  4. TED Talks Daily
  5. The Daily

US most popular podcasts

  1. The Joe Rogan Experience
  2. Crime Junkie
  3. Call Her Daddy
  4. The Daily
  5. NPR News Now

Read more: Best streaming music service

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