Spotify Wrapped 2024—multitudes, evolution, and high-contrast gradient blends

If you’re already wondering, “When does Spotify Wrapped come out?” you’re not alone! From top genres to most-listened-to songs and favorite artists, Spotify Wrapped has captivated music lovers worldwide every year since its conception in 2016.

However, in addition to its data-backed, punchy marketing campaign calling attention to listeners’ habits and preferences throughout the year, Spotify Wrapped’s design is also a big part of its pull.

While the Spotify Wrapped aesthetic has evolved over time, its overall brand has remained consistent: bright colors, geometric patterns, gradients galore, and its classic sans serif font. 

Feeling rapped about Spotify Wrapped 2024? Let’s deep dive into Spotify Wrapped’s most iconic design trends over the last decade.

Spotify Wrapped 2016’s global marketing push brought hilarity, comfort, and a sense of unity at the end of a very weird year. By highlighting the weird and unique experiences of listeners and calling them out, Spotify united people during a year when music was one major connection between people.

Aligned with their goal of music for everyone, the Spotify Wrapped 2016 theme was “Thanks, 2016. It’s Been Weird.”

The style featured a color palette of 50s red, fiery rose, mint green, and a grounding black. When paired with layers of wavy, squiggly, and dotted shapes, the aesthetic was an updated mix of midcentury modern and pop art. The brightly colored sans-serif text vibrated on top of bright slides, with the black used as balancing accents.

An evolution of the year before, Spotify Wrapped 2017 continued 2016’s success with the theme “2018 Goals,” which focused on New Year’s resolutions and weaved in Spotify’s characteristic humor.

Elements from this year included a holiday palette, lively squiggles, circles, and sepia artist photos layered on top of geometric shapes. 

With the launch of their Spotify Wrapped website, Spotify rolled out an even larger-scale marketing campaign than before, taking the best of the previous campaigns and building on their success. The fact that premium listeners could submit their own Wrapped to the site meant they had a chance to see their share cards on billboards around the world and drew 20+ million fans to the website on the first day alone.

Spotify’s live image data analysis allowed them to create 350 unique posters, all brought together into one cohesively branded project. Color played an important part this year: with a carefully picked palette of a vast variety, each Wrapped was now unique to each person.

Text also had an important role: following the trend of text as design, artist names, and important stats appeared in gigantic text with overlapping artist headshots in both solid and cutout form.

A brand new element that would truly bring the 2018 Spotify Wrapped style to your project was the use of brightly colored 3D models. 

With the theme of “A decade wrapped”, Spotify Wrapped 2019 leaned into a decade’s worth of data-backed personal stories. From small details like the “speed of your sound” to big-picture realizations like the number of countries artists on your playlist are from, Spotify Wrapped 2019 covered new data and stories they hadn’t before. With a decidedly electric palette, open compositions, and layered graphics, the aesthetic was a natural continuation of Spotify’s style journey.

Eclectic 3D design animations were a special part of being a premium member. The font, Circular Sp UI Bold, was a perfect sans-serif font choice to work consistently with artists’ portraits.

After nearly a year of isolation, when music was a key part of keeping us all feeling connected, Spotify Wrapped 2020 focused on “Gratitude and Resilience” as its theme to highlight the community of people who “kept us entertained, grounded and informed”.

By highlighting major movements such as work-from-home, health and wellness, and Black Lives Matter, Spotify once again showed its cultural relevance. In a first for Spotify Wrapped, it invited non-users to take part and check out global listening trends.

Building on its recognizable style of bright colors, sans serif font, and artist headshots, Spotify brought in new elements such as multicolor gradients, reflected imagery, and animated color. Sometimes artists featured over gradient backgrounds, and other times gradient text was placed over a solid color. 

Spotify Wrapped 2021 marked a disordered year on a global scale for its theme and visuals. Similar to Instagram Stories, each slide was meant to be shareable over the app. Pulling in pop culture references from films, visualized audio auras, and a blend feature that matched tastes with friends, the base theme of Spotify Wrapped 2021 became a disorganized amalgamation that bled over into the visuals.

Typography chaos, word art color combos, and basic graphics contained in a ribbon were all key elements of the Spotify Wrapped 2021 aesthetic. While the style was generally disliked in 2021, it might be widely loved now for its tie to the anti-design movement.

Moving with the flow of societal trends, Spotify spotlighted the increased individuality that resulted from the pandemic through its 2022 theme “Self-expression and play”.

Monograms were at the center of the Spotify Wrapped 2022 campaign, with overlapped and interlocking shapes that showed an incredible 48 design possibilities while all working together as one common style.

Motion design brought these monograms to life, showing how each one could have a different personality. The combination of jarring colors and shapes, color-vibrating gradients, walls of text, and playful interactivity brought home the movement of our society toward celebrating individuality. 

Gridless and chaotic, Spotify Wrapped 2023 aimed to reflect the convergence of real data and the chaos of merging real and internet life.

A return to the anti-design style of 2021, the new Wrapped style included “pixels, wiggles, plates, and shapes”. It also featured the repeated imagery, motion graphics, and gradients of previous years.

Are you ready for Spotify Wrapped 2024? With these past aesthetics under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running with the latest trends come Spotify Wrapped season. Plus, you can find all the trendy elements you need on Envato!

For more trend-setting design inspiration, check out 8 cutting-edge font trends for 2024, the maximalist design trend, and 3D design trends to expect in 2025.