Photo Credit: Samuel Regan-Asante
Spotify Wrapped keeps track of everything you’ve listened to on the service over the course of a year. But when does Spotify Wrapped stop tracking data? Here’s what we know.
In the past, the cut off date for Spotify Wrapped was October 31. But that leaves two whole months out of the year that your music listening isn’t being tracked. What if you love Mariah Carey’s take on Christmas music? Or if your favorite song of the year happened to drop on November 15? Are those stats rolled into the next year? That may have been the case previously for Spotify Wrapped, but the dates used to calculate your yearly listening have changed.
On October 13, 2022, the official Spotify Twitter(X) account wrote, “the only thing that we end on Halloween is eating candy corn. Stream (and snack) all through the year and we’ll see you in Wrapped season.”
That statement is backed up by a statement made in the Spotify Community forums. Asking about the exclusion of November & December on Spotify Wrapped, a moderator responds “we can confirm that your Wrapped will include listening data past October 31. We don’t have any further info to share on this right now.”
The internet scuttlebutt is that Spotify has quietly moved up its stop tracking date to November 15—though that date has not been confirmed by any official source. Spotify’s changes to when it stops tracking data for the Spotify Wrapped round-up are likely a response to complaints about the lack of tracking for the end of the year.
With the last two months of the year containing major holidays for most Americans—listening habits can change as family and friends share their tastes in music. But the time cost of processing the sheer amount of data may have led to that early October 31 cut off date for Spotify Wrapped.
Prior to 2016, Spotify stored and processed its data using the Hadoop framework for processing its data. Past 2016, Spotify shifted its data processing to the Google Cloud Platform. That change increased Spotify’s ability to process data, but bottlenecks remained because of the Hadoop framework.
In 2019, Spotify constructed a new data processing engine in-house called Scio, which Spotify uses to run batch and streaming pipelines at the scale it needs. This change in how it processed data also likely means the cut off for Spotify Wrapped could be moved up, since data could be processed for these reports much faster and on a grander scale.
