Tag: Music Trends

Social Media

Spotify Wrapped 2025 Arrives with New Features, Clubs, and Interactive Listening Insights

Tanisha Cardozo

Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral

As the year winds down, music lovers have a new reason to celebrate — Spotify Wrapped 2025 is live, ready to reveal the soundtrack that shaped your year. After months of discovering new artists, rediscovering familiar favorites, and exploring playlists across genres, this year’s Wrapped offers a refreshed and more immersive look at each listener’s audio habits. First introduced in 2015, Spotify Wrapped has evolved into a global tradition, and the 2025 edition pushes the experience even further with new interactive features and deeper insights.

Covering listening activity from January through mid-November, Wrapped highlights each user’s top artists, songs, genres, and total minutes spent on the app. This year it also includes refined reports that analyze listening style, determine a “listening age,” and present a short quiz that challenges users to guess their top song of the year. Spotify’s updates also extend to podcasts and audiobooks, with personalized highlights such as top genres and even special messages from favorite authors or podcasters.

A standout addition this year is Wrapped Party, a new way to turn listening data into a friendly competition among friends. Up to ten people can join, and each participant receives awards based on their unique listening habits.

Depending on who’s in the group, users can see who logged the most minutes, who shares the most musical compatibility, or who is the most devoted fan of their top artist. Another major update, Wrapped Clubs, groups listeners into musical communities based on shared tastes. There are six clubs—Cloud State Society, Grit Collective, Serotonin, Full Charge Crew, Cosmic Stereo Club, and Soft Hearts Club—each representing a different listening personality. Within these clubs, users are assigned roles like archivist, curator, collector, specialist, and more, based on how their habits compare to others in the group.

Spotify Wrapped 2025 is available in nearly every region where Spotify operates, with a few participation requirements. Users must have listened to at least 30 tracks for more than 30 seconds each and streamed at least five different artists throughout the year. Wrapped can only be accessed through the mobile app on iOS or Android, where a dedicated Wrapped tab appears at the top of the screen. From there, listeners can explore their story and browse the top songs, artists, podcasts, and audiobooks in the U.S. and around the world.

This year’s Wrapped brings back the nostalgia and excitement fans look forward to while introducing fresh and engaging ways to understand how they spent the last year immersed in the world of audio.

Music

Sony Music’s Shridhar Subramaniam Champions Asia’s Cultural Diversity at All That Matters

Tanisha Cardozo

At the All That Matters conference held in Singapore, Shridhar Subramaniam, President of Sony Music Asia and Middle East and Chair of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), delivered an insightful discourse on Asia’s expanding role in the global music industry. Emphasizing the region’s vibrant cultural diversity and localized music scenes, he outlined how these elements are rapidly shaping the future of music on a worldwide scale.

Subramaniam pointed to the IFPI’s initiative of launching weekly charts across six Asian countries as a groundbreaking benchmark for measuring success in an extraordinarily diverse region. He likened Asia’s cultural and linguistic variety to a “stratified Grand Canyon,” where deeper exploration reveals new colors, sounds, and artistic expressions.

One striking example he shared was Indonesia’s traditional dangdut music, a folk-rooted genre that has been revitalized by urban youth into a modern hybrid called “hipdut.” This fusion of old rhythms and contemporary beats has dominated Indonesian charts throughout the year, prompting Sony Music to invest early with a dedicated label and acquisition strategy. The genre’s trajectory mirrors that of reggaeton, which successfully crossed into Afrobeats and Punjabi music, exemplifying how regional styles can achieve global resonance.

The Philippines, with its Pinoy pop scene, is another burgeoning hotspot. Acts like SB19, inspired partly by the K-pop model but firmly localized, have amassed billions of streams and expanded into new markets like Japan through live tours and collaborations. Subramaniam also noted Thailand’s rising prominence and cross-border collaborations involving Korean, Japanese, and Chinese producers, underscoring the dynamic exchange within Asian music.

Despite the fragmented and competitive nature of the industry, Subramaniam stressed the importance of initial domestic success as a springboard to global breakthroughs. Drawing parallels to K-pop’s rise, he acknowledged that fervent home fan bases have been crucial in propelling artists onto the world stage.

With Spotify alone uploading over 135,000 new songs daily, the challenge of artist development has intensified. However, evolving strategies such as fan economies, live touring, and media syncs offer a diverse toolkit to help artists find their unique paths to success.

Looking ahead, Subramaniam remains optimistic about Asia’s cultural and economic influence in music. From contributing less than 7% to nearly 15% of the global market in recent years, Asia is poised to reach 20%, with hyper-local scenes increasingly shaping global culture through sheer volume and algorithmic power. The dominance of Indian and Latin American acts on platforms like YouTube illustrates this trend, suggesting similar patterns will emerge across other streaming services.

Asia’s music moment is here, fueled by cultural richness, innovation, and an unyielding drive from artists and fans alike — a phenomenon that Sony Music and Shridhar Subramaniam are proudly championing on the world stage.