By Katrina, Assistant Editor at The News Lens. December 4, 2025.
WORLD — As 2025 enters its final month, the world’s three biggest streaming platforms, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, are once again inviting users to look back at a year of playlists, podcasts, and viral clips through their annual recap tools.
This year, the focus is on deeper personalisation, more social sharing, and new ways to visualise how people listen to music and consume video.
Spotify: “Listening age” and club roles
Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped still includes the familiar basics: top artists, most played songs, favourite genres, total listening minutes, and podcast stats for each user.
The company has added several new twists that are driving social media discussion. The first is a “listening age” score that estimates which age group a user’s habits most resemble. The metric compares a person’s listening patterns with others in their demographic and factors in the release years of the songs they play most often. For many users, the result feels like a nostalgic reminder of when their core music tastes were formed.
Spotify has also grouped styles into six “listening clubs.” Within each club, users are assigned a “role” that highlights how their listening stands out compared with other members of the same cluster.
A new “group recap party” feature lets people invite friends, then combines everyone’s statistics into one interactive video that hands out playful awards such as “pickiest listener” or “early riser listener.” Rather than simply posting a static screenshot, users can compare data live and receive joint badges based on their shared habits.
Apple Music: Explore, loyalty, and return lists
Apple Music’s 2025 recap adds three new indicators that are meant to show how long relationships with artists evolve over time.
“Explore” tracks performers that a user started listening to for the first time this year. “Loyalty” focuses on artists that fans return to year after year. A “return chart” highlights musicians who had faded from a user’s rotation and then reappeared in 2025.
Apple Music also compares 2024 and 2025 data to show how individual tastes have shifted. A milestone system turns listening into a kind of achievement game. Users can unlock badges by passing thresholds for minutes listened, number of tracks played, or total artists sampled.
YouTube: First full “YouTube Recap” for the platform’s 20th anniversary
Marking the twentieth anniversary of the platform’s launch, YouTube is introducing a personalised “YouTube Recap” for the first time.
The feature presents a series of story-style cards that summarise what a user watched across the year. These include key topics, favourite creators, changes in viewing habits, and a personality type generated from the mix of content consumed.
For users who listen to music on YouTube or YouTube Music, the recap also lists top artists, songs, and genres, along with podcast preferences.
The recap tool began rolling out in the United States on December 2 and will be introduced to other markets, including Taiwan, later in the week.
Global rankings: Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga, and Joe Rogan stay on top
Alongside personalised stats, the 2025 recaps are also a snapshot of global pop culture.
According to Spotify’s yearly report, Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny once again took the title of most-streamed artist worldwide, with 19.8 billion plays, continuing a four-year run at number one. The rest of the global top five were Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Drake, and Billie Eilish.
The most-streamed song of 2025 was “Die With A Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, which passed 1.7 billion streams. Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” rose to second place after ranking third last year. “APT” by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars came in third, followed by “Ordinary” by Alex Warren and “DtMF” by Bad Bunny.
On the global album chart, Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” ranked first. The soundtrack for Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” took second place. Billie Eilish’s “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” both returned to the top five, in third and fifth place. SZA’s “SOS Deluxe: LANA” placed fourth.
Podcast listening continued to concentrate around a handful of dominant shows. “The Joe Rogan Experience” remained Spotify’s most popular podcast worldwide for the sixth year in a row. “The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett” and “The Mel Robbins Podcast” ranked second and third. Spotify noted that podcasts are increasingly used as a way to process major cultural events in real time, from platform shutdowns and awards show controversies to celebrity relationship news.
YouTube trends: Squid Game, “brainrot” and Nintendo Switch 2
YouTube’s trend list, which uses views, upload volume, and creator activity, highlights a mix of entertainment, internet culture, and politics.
Among the most prominent topics this year were “Squid Game,” the Korean survival drama that remains a global reference point; conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, “Brainrot,” a slang term roughly translated as “大腦腐蝕,” used for the mental fog that comes from consuming large amounts of low quality online content; popular character Labubu; and anticipation around “Nintendo Switch 2.”
Together, the 2025 recaps show how tightly streaming data is now woven into the way people understand their own media habits. For the platforms, they are also powerful annual marketing campaigns. For users, they have become a kind of digital diary of what they listened to, watched, and talked about throughout the year.
Kaohsiung Times appreciates The News Lens for allowing us to translate and publish selected works. Visit The News Lens website for original articles.
