My Spotify Wrapped is wrong

This year’s Spotify Wrapped is in. Mine is straight up wrong.

For as much as I bitch about it, I still use Spotify.

I listen to somewhere in the ballpark of 7 hours of music every day. On the weekends it’s probably closer to 10 hours. I have a Daily Mix playlist where I queue up entire albums and throw in individual tracks between those albums, I usually build the playlist up to about 25 hours total then let it get down to 10 hours before I add more albums and songs. Spotify has a ton of bugs and flaws, but it makes it easy to find and listen to almost any music that I want.

One of the features I actually like is Spotify Wrapped.

At the end of every year, Spotify tells you things like how long you listened, what your top 100 most listened songs were, and the artist you listened to the most. I’m a sucker for stupid stats like this, I love flexing how many tens of thousands of minutes I’ve listened to music over the year, I love showing my friends the goofy songs that I purposely played a bunch to make my top most listened, and I love having artists most people haven’t heard of in my top artists list.

This year, I set out to make a very specific song my number one most played song, and a specific artist my most played artist. I played the shit out of “Shia LaBeouf Live”, a song by some guy named Rob Cantor. The song is silly, it’s about somebody walking through the dark woods when they stumble across actor Shia LaBeouf. As it turns out, Shia is a cannibal, and he attacks the main character of the song (who is supposed to be you). This results in a fight to the death that ends with Shia LaBeouf having his head cut off with an axe. I’ve never seen the music video, but apparently Shia himself is in it.

I played this song constantly, almost daily. I played it in conjunction with another song, “Imperium of Man” by Jonathan Young. I wanted “Shia LaBeouf Live” to be my number one song, but honestly I wouldn’t have been surprised if “Imperium of Man” took the spot and bumped “Shia LaBeouf Live” to number two. All glory to the Emperor and Holy Terra.

However, I was very surprised when I opened my Spotify Wrapped for this year and didn’t see “Shia LaBeouf Live” in my top five at all:

The rest of these songs probably aren’t wrong, I listened to them a lot. But “Shia LaBeouf Live” was not only omitted from my top five songs, it wasn’t even listed in the top 100. The song isn’t blacked out on Spotify or anything, I can still pull it up and listen to it. For whatever reason, they decided to pretend like I never listened to it. There’s no reason that I can find for this at all. It’s not some weird anti-trolling measure or whatever, a couple years back I had a Lazytown song as my top song. I guess “Shia LaBeouf Live” isn’t trendy enough for their metrics? Fucked if I know.

For my top artist, I planned for it to be South Philly underground hardcore rapper Vinnie Paz. I love this guy’s stuff, he goes hard on every track and brings a raw grittiness to rap that none of these big artists do. He hits hard every time, and I don’t think enough people know who he is.

I listened to entire Vinnie Paz albums every day. There’s no way this guy shouldn’t be at the top of my top artists list. And yet, he got shoved down to number five:

I’m willing to accept that Ill Bill and Hollywood Undead were in my top five. While I’m skeptical that Sabaton was, I’m willing to admit it’s possible I could be wrong on that one. But how the fuck is Eminem my number one artist?! I listened to Em, but I didn’t listen to him anywhere near as much as the other artists on here. I listened to a Vinnie Paz album almost every single day, how the hell is he all the way down at number five?! It’s obvious what’s going on here, Spotify is prejudiced against underground Italian Muslim rappers from Philly.

That sounded like hyperbole, but it’s honestly probably not. Spotify is currently facing a lawsuit accusing them of engaging in a good ol’ fashioned payola scam. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many big artists are paying for their music to get prioritized on the platform, and I hope this lawsuit exposes it.

Another feature of Spotify Wrapped is your most played albums:

Again, I’m willing to accept that these albums were in my top ten. They’re all good albums, I know I listened to them a lot this year. But I know for a fact that there’s at least one album that I’ve listened to a shit ton this year that should be on the list but isn’t. Appetite for Destruction by Guns and Roses is nowhere on there, despite the fact that I’ve probably listened to it once a week. The Eminem Show was probably in my top five, but Encore definitely doesn’t belong on there, especially not in place of Appetite for Destruction.

What the hell is going on? It’s like whenever I think Spotify can’t get any worse they take it as a personal challenge and find new and creative ways to suck even harder. Wrapped has been pretty accurate the last five years, but suddenly it can’t track entire songs? I’m not even really that mad about the artist or album thing, I’m more concerned with the fact that it outright ignored “Shia LaBeouf Live”. A slightly skewed play count is one thing, but to just completely omit a song for no discernible reason is bullshit.

Fix you fucking shit, Spotify.

Anyway, I’ll close this out with my REAL top song of 2025:

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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