Year-end wraps: Digging deep into digital habits

Platforms are not only studying every consumer move, they are shaping it as well

- SUGANDHA MUKHERJEE

SPOTIFY WRAPPED, APPLE Music Replay, Instagram Recap and YouTube's year-end trends arrive each December with the inevitability of a tax form.

The visual language hardly changes with bright cards, ranked lists, cheerful narrative slides designed for instant sharing. But beneath those familiar graphics sits a technical ecosystem that is anything but static.

The idea sounds simple: summarise 12 months of listening and viewing into a digestible story. The reality is less tidy though. Platforms now operate at a scale where billions of actions such as listens, skips, shares, rewatches, pauses, must be interpreted and not just counted. The platforms want to know why they did so, what else they were doing around that moment, and what it signals about future appetite. For example, this year, Spotify Wrapped 2025 engaged over 200 million users within the first 24 hours of its release, marking a 19% increase in initial engagement compared to the previous year.

To do this, Spotify and its rivals have built what engineers call "taste graphs" which are giant maps linking users, songs, artistes and genres based on how often they co-occur. These maps are then translated into embeddings, or numerical coordinates that allow the system to measure similarity. If two users have broadly overlapping tastes, their coordinates sit near each other, even if they never listen to the exact same tracks.