Every time we reach the end of the year, another service gets the Spotify Wrapped treatment. This year marks the first time YouTube has done a roundup: its new YouTube Recap.
And while it sounds like a natural fit for the year-end celebration season, YouTube Recap fell flat for me. With Spotify Wrapped launching a day later and impressing me much more, I’ve worked through why this is.
YouTube Recap feels sterile
I don’t feel connected to it at all
YouTube Recap begins with a list of “things” (the most boring word imaginable) you’ve explored. This is a general list of categories, like “cultural events”, “examining product design”, and “comedy sketches”.
You then get your top interests; my top two were “Zelda game analysis” and “Overwatch strategies”. This feels off to me; while I’m super into Overwatch, I didn’t watch that many videos about it this year. Entire categories of my favorite channels are missing, like political/cultural analysis and scam overviews.
It’s possible that YouTube chose to hide channels that cover controversial topics, like politics, to avoid people feeling awkward when sharing their recaps with friends. This is understandable, but if those filters are already in place, a toggle would have been an easy addition to solve the problem.
Recap then tells you how many channels you watched this year, along with your top five. I was surprised at my #3; I watched a lot of Zaino earlier in the year when I was on a Balatro kick, but didn’t watch the channel at all in the second half of the year.
The entire process reeks of AI
YouTube Recap says at the start that AI can make mistakes; I’m not sure if that happened in the data, but the text phrasing has the fingerprints of AI all over it.
The next several Recap pages are a good example of this. Under my “Game-savvy” moniker, the text uses a super generic tone—“it seems!” sounds like a distant comment of someone who isn’t at all familiar with the subject matter. I’m also “culturally aware” and “analytical”, according to those same categories seen at the start.
Recap then assigns you a personality type—mine was “The Curious Mind” because I watch videos that help me “understand the world”. Following that, you get a breakdown of areas you focused on and channels you watched, at various points in the year. This is more interesting, but it still made some strange picks. I don’t recall watching more than a few videos from CGP Grey this year, but Recap chose it as one of my top mid-2025 channels.
It then showed me the top video games I watched videos about, which is interesting. However, I watch a lot of videos that talk about multiple games in one, which doesn’t play well with YouTube’s game tagging system. I can understand why this happens, but it further contributes to Recap feeling off.
The final page with my “YouTube award” is the clumsiest bit of all. I was given “most likely to find the hidden gem in any video game or cultural trend”, which doesn’t make sense.
A “hidden gem” is something of exceptional quality that isn’t widely known. You’d describe a game, restaurant, or Apple TV show as a hidden gem, but you can’t find the “hidden gem” inside a game. And by definition, a cultural trend can’t be a hidden gem—if it’s a trend, it’s already well-known. Is this really the best they could come up with?
Spotify Wrapped is a huge improvement this year
A proper celebration of music
Like many others, I was disappointed with Spotify Wrapped in 2024. It was heavily AI-influenced, categorizing your listening into made-up genres like “Sweater Weather Permanent Wave Indie”.
Wrapped 2024 also featured a short NotebookLM “podcast”, where the AI “hosts” talked about your listening history. I was not at all enticed to listen to two bland, fake voices generically listing off songs when there’s no human connection or understanding of the art form.
Wrapped 2025 is a huge improvement, thankfully. It brought back real genres, new bits like your “listening age”, and even a cool Listening Party feature you can enjoy with friends. My favorite change is that it features your top albums for the first time, which I hugely appreciate as an album-oriented listener.
There are still traces of AI in Spotify Wrapped 2025, with an “archive” summary of noteworthy days. This comes after the summary card and feels like an extra, rather than a focus, so I don’t mind it.
Why YouTube doesn’t click while Spotify succeeds
Recapping videos is a tall order
Spotify Wrapped feels much more personal and intentional than YouTube Recap. Wrapped has a consistent theme, pauses until you swipe to the next page, offers a quick quiz for your top song and visualization of your top artists, and is more visually dynamic.
The text is another factor. I understand that recaps have to keep the wording general for so many different people, but Spotify Wrapped manages to do this while still sounding tailored to you. YouTube Recap repeats itself a lot, too.
After comparing them back-to-back, I noticed how little data YouTube’s Recap shares with you. Spotify includes numbers for your total listening minutes, count of genres, albums, artists, and songs, plays for your top song, and the percentage you fall into for your top artist. That’s a lot of data, which is fun to see for something as personal as music.
I found my lifetime Spotify listening stats, and it’s better than Spotify Wrapped
I’m more than a little surprised at my most listened-to songs and artists of all time.
In contrast, the only numbers Recap has are the number of channels you watched, the count of videos you watched from your top channel, and your viewership percentile for that channel. There’s no total count of viewing hours, which strikes me as the biggest omission.
Videos and music have different needs
To a point, this is an inherent issue with the differences between videos and music. Music is easily grouped into albums and genres (though the latter is fluid). It’s far harder to categorize videos from a channel that might cover different topics.
Discussing this with my colleagues also raised the point that the nature of each platform has an effect. People probably aren’t proud of watching YouTube if they’re trying to spend less time on their phones. Seeing how many hours you wasted on transient video, especially if you primarily watch Shorts, could be more depressing than exciting.
I try my best to use YouTube mindfully, keeping up with my favorite channels and not mindlessly watching low-quality nonsense. I thus would prefer a more detailed Recap, but I see how it could be different for others. It’s easier to feel a connection with the music you like, since you likely listen to a lot of the same music year after year. And nobody feels guilty for listening to “too much” music.
YouTube adopting “thank you” videos from creators, as Spotify has had for years, would go a long way in helping viewers feel more connected to their favorite channels. I like seeing the people behind my favorite music, and those videos feel like an exclusive reward for supporting the artist.
There’s always next year for YouTube Recap
YouTube Recap leaves a lot to be desired, but since this is its first year, I hope the company learns from this and makes improvements for future iterations. More stats, a more dynamic visual style, and more connection to the creators you follow would help a lot.
If you use both or either of these services, what do you think of them? I’d be curious if you found YouTube Recap as lackluster as I did, or what ways you’d improve it for the future.
