Illustration by The Globe and Mail; supplied, Getty Images
We will not beat around the bush here: Spotify has had a contentious year. Between musicians dumping the streamer over founder Daniel Ek’s investment in military drone technology, allegations that the company ignores artificially inflated streaming numbers, and claims of AI-generated music flooding the platform, this year’s Spotify Wrapped may have landed, for many, with a bit of a bit more skepticism than usual.
Nevertheless, it landed, as did its Apple Music and YouTube counterparts. So here, Globe and Mail staff discuss what they loved, listened to, and simply couldn’t escape on streaming this year.
Joe Castaldo, business reporter
My Top Artist: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
My Top Album: Far In, Helado Negro
My Top Song: Efter Dig, Gustaf Ljunggren and Emil de Waal
My Spotify Listening Age: 50
Spotify has a diabolic knack for producing meaningless insights that get people talking, and I have sadly fallen victim to that. I was miffed this year to learn that my “listening age” is 50, nearly a full decade older than my actual age. After some thought, I’m fine with it. Sure, I try to keep up with the latest hot young thing (I did have U.K. noise-rockers DITZ in my top five) but great artists get better with time.
That’s especially true of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, my most listened to artist. I saw Cave perform some 25 years ago as a teen, holding one snakeskin loafer aloft as he walked over the crowd, and experienced what felt like a spiritual conversion. I saw him again in Toronto this year, and though I was much farther back this time, the show was no less transcendent. At 68, Cave is still an electric performer, a spindly figure prowling the stage in a well-tailored suit like some kind of rock and roll mortician. Cave and his ferocious backing band can set your heart on fire (From Her to Eternity) and absolutely shatter it (Bright Horses). The guy has been through things.
There are a few lines from his song Frogs that have been in my head all year: “The frogs are jumping in the gutters / Oh, leaping to God, amazed of love / And amazed to pain / Amazed to be back in the water again.” You can find a world of human experience in Cave’s music – joy, loss, love, battles with faith and spiritual longing and the most wry and poetic song about conception you’re likely to find. It’s a range and depth that can only come from a life lived. So whatever my real age or listening age is, let the years roll on, I say.
James Griffiths, Asia correspondent
My Top Artist: Jamie xx
My Top Album: In Waves, Jamie xx
My Top Song: Breather, Jamie xx
I’m Listening On: YouTube Music
In late 2024, I went to see British DJ Jamie xx play a headline set at Clockenflap, an annual music festival in Hong Kong, where I’m based for The Globe and Mail. I’ve been a fan of Jamie xx since his days in the xx, the influential 2000s British indie rock band, but had never seen him live before.
At the time, I was going through a personal crisis that would only heighten in the months to come and had spent much of the rest of the festival in something of a blur. When, early in the set, Jamie xx dropped Gosh, a track from his second album, In Colour, all my worries washed away as my brain was flooded with endorphins, bouncing around in a crowd of thousands. The whole set was the happiest I had been in weeks, and I carried the memory with me into 2025.
It was perhaps inevitable then that my YouTube Music wrap of this year is completely dominated by Jamie xx, who the app tells me I listened to for 958 minutes, or about 1.5 times the entire Lord of the Rings film trilogy (extended editions). I listed to one song alone, Breather, for nearly 300 minutes, longer than Lawrence of Arabia. When I ran a marathon in mid-November, it was largely to the sounds of a Jamie xx live set.
While this speaks to a Swiftie-level obsession with one artist, YouTube Music tells me I actually listened to 581 musicians this year, though I imagine this was largely thanks to workout playlists as I trained for my marathon, as my top 10 is full of old stalwarts like the Smashing Pumpkins and Linkin Park (yes, I am a millennial), as well as my favourite Hong Kong band, my little airport.
Tyler Dawson, content editor, Opinion
My Top Artist: System of a Down
My Top Album: Elect the Dead, Serj Tankian
My Top Song: Sinners Like Me, Eric Church
My Spotify Listening age: (Bang on at) 36
My first thought, upon seeing my Spotify wrapped, was “well, clearly I didn’t get dumped this year.” Only one or two of the well-worn songs from my well-curated and oft-visited breakup playlist made the final tally.
Instead, the music mostly was stuff I go to when I’m happy. Paradoxically, perhaps, this includes a hefty dose of System of a Down; one friend informed me by text that that’s a cry for help of its own sort, although I haven’t totally figured out why. Mudvayne, the nu-metal band, made it back into the regular cycle of listening, probably for the first time since high school.
Also making an appearance this year: Jack’s Mannequin, a band I listened to plenty in my high school days. This can probably be explained by a trip I made to Denver with a best friend to see three of frontman Andrew McMahon’s bands play at Red Rocks, surely among the most iconic concert venues in North America.
And of course, there are a few country ballads that were the sappy accompaniment to a bike ride home from seeing friends on a warm summer’s night. Mitchell Tenpenny’s Always Something With You stood out from that list. As did Love Your Love the Most by Eric Church. And since apparently I did need some hype music to get in a party mood (there was a bachelor party in Mexico City to consider after all) Mongomery Gentry’s One in Every Crowd was the No. 2 song of 2025.
Rebecca Tucker, deputy editor, Arts & Books
My Top Artist: Bad Bunny
My Top Album: Debi Tiras Mas Fotos, Bad Bunny
My Top Song: Baile Inolvidable, Bad Bunny
I’m Listening On: Apple Music
As the editor of this annual digest, I have the advantage of reading everyone’s submissions before I write my own. And so it is with some surprise (and more than a little smugness) that I report that my — and only my — top artist was Bad Bunny, my top album was Bad Bunny’s Debi Tirar Mas Fotos, and my top song was Baile Inolvidable, from DTMF. Smugness because DTMF was not only a veritable global phenomenon this year – from Bad Bunny’s nose-thumb at the U.S. via the one-two punch of a historic 30-show concert residency in his native Puerto Rico and a refusal to tour the mainstream States – but was a critical darling, landing on best-of lists from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork … and, on this list, my taste seems to be in a league of its own.
Cliff Lee, letters editor
My Top Artist: Tyler, The Creator
My Top Album: Don’t Tap The Glass, Tyler, The Creator
My Top Song: Big Poe, Tyler, The Creator and Pharrell Williams
My Spotify Listening Age: 19
I had spent the 24 hours before the launch of this year’s Spotify Wrapped listening intently to some critically acclaimed squawking. It was good squawking – Geese’s Getting Killed, the experimental rock album topping year-end lists and which sounds much to me like geese getting killed – but squawking nonetheless.
This is what I call my “homework” listening, wherein I try to apply discipline to the act of desperately hanging on to my music-forward youth. Which is probably why Spotify looked deep into my 40-year-old soul and determined I was forever young, or at least 19 in listening age because “you listen to mostly new music.”
Despite the diminishing returns of time as I get older and responsibilities pile up, I still make a point of checking out new releases every Friday and pretending to know more than 10 per cent of the bands and musicians reviewed by Pitchfork. I may not love what I hear, but I can say I heard it!
To who, though? The demands of work and life have long sucked up the time most friends used to have for discovering new artists. We love to quote Taylor Swift to each other and go see old favourites celebrating anniversaries, of which the milestones are creeping into 20th, 25th, 30th years (is this how it feels to be a boomer Beatles fan?). But I am most often left to quietly contemplate whether I am wild for Geese.
I am sad to report I am not. It turns out my artist and album of the year is Tyler, The Creator’s Don’t Tap The Glass, a throbbing hip-hop club album dripping with sweat and fulfilling promises of the best night of your Gen Z life – or, for me, a solid listen for the morning commute to work.
Mark Medley, deputy editor, Opinion
My Top Artist: Vampire Weekend
My Top Album: Cotton Crown, The Tubs
My Top Song: Hallways, PUP
I’m Listening On: Apple Music
I’m starting to question the accuracy of my Apple Music Replay – how else to explain the startling omission of the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack from my year-in-review. It feels like I listened to Soda Pop so many times that I’m the Saja Boys’ unofficial sixth member.
In any case, you might be wondering why Vampire Weekend, who did not release an album in 2025, was my most listened to artist of the year? The answer is that they’re one of the few acts my whole family unabashedly adores – and their last album, 2024’s Only God Was Above Us, is excellent enough to have remained in constant rotation. We’ve never taken a car trip lasting more than 90 minutes that didn’t feature a cameo from the band.
As for the rest of my top 5? Montreal’s Béatrice Martin, better known as Coeur de Pirate, secured a place for the second year in a row on the strength of her first album in four years, Cavale, whose title track features the best saxophone solo of the year. (Er, no, I will not name another saxophone solo.)
Third place on my list, but first in line at Sneaky Dee’s, are Toronto’s very own PUP, who are also responsible for my most-played song of the year, Hallways, from their latest (excellent) album, Who Will Look After the Dogs? (My five-year-old son has taken to scream-singing “What the hell am I gonna do if I can never see you anymore” at the most awkward times. It’s sweet, really.)
Only 46 minutes separated the first and fourth place acts on my list, which in this case was The Tubs, the British jangle-rock outfit whose sophomore album, Cotton Crown, is my pick for record of the year. (I blame Josh O’Kane) Fun fact: They played Toronto twice in 2025, and I had to give up my tickets at the last-minute both times, which is second only to the Blue Jays’ game seven collapse when it comes to 2025’s biggest gut punches.)
Finally, The Killers. See last year.
One glaring omission? No Oasis! It felt the lads were in my earphones from Jan. 1 until the moment I finally saw them live at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium in August, truly a moment that will live forever. Forget Jinu – Liam is my idol.
Adrian Lee, editor in the Opinion section, and contributing pop culture columnist
My Top Artist: Nao
My Top Album: Jupiter, Nao
My Top Song: Wildflowers, Nao (the first song on Jupiter)
I’m Listening On: Apple Music
By some measures, 2025 was one of the best years of my life; in a few specific and significant ways, it was absolutely one of the worst. I’ve done enough therapy to accept that the steady accumulation of the gems of joy and the barnacles of despair is what we should call a gratefully lived life, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the math works out that way when you’re in the throes of its calculus. So it comes as little surprise to me that, through this year of merciless duality, I found myself unthinkingly pulling on the comforting coat of the funky, omnivorous R&B purveyed by the sweet-voiced London singer Nao. (I’m also not surprised that my second- and third-most listened albums were Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE and Donovan Woods’s Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, given the number of sad zone-out drives I undertook this year.)
I’ve been a fan of Nao and her unbelievable vocal range since her first EP came out in 2014, and hers is the kind of music you can just throw on across contexts: it lifts you when you’re low and meets you when you’re wrapped in the warmth of friends. Her album Jupiter, which was released in February, is not her best – that’s her 2018 record Saturn, and yes, maybe there’s something to the idea that things get a little worse as you get closer to Earth. But Jupiter is a charming and clear-eyed dispatch from the other end of the tunnel, by a woman who’s found peace after hard years: a breakup, navigating new motherhood, an autoimmune-disorder diagnosis.
“I’m starting to see it’s all good/so, so, so, so, so, so good,” she sings, with an earnestness I’m typically allergic to. But it is nice to be reminded that healing can happen, however janky a path it may take. May we all get a little closer to all good, so good next year.
Dexter McMillan, data editor
My Top Artist: Tate McRae
My Top Album: Rosie, Rosé
My Top Song: Slip, Tate McRae
My Spotify Listening Age: 28
I’ll be the first to admit that my musical tastes are uncomplicated – the last few years have been hard for all of us, and I think my top five are an antidote to that. My most-listened-to songs are heavy on pop girlies with a touch of nostalgia. I spent most of my year learning to love the music a lot of people turn up their nose at and revisiting music I had long ago forgotten.
I rang in the start of 2025 with APT, a song the entire world was familiar with at the end of last year. My brother- and sister-in-law live in Asia, and during one of the (unfortunately) very rare times I get to see them, over last year’s Christmas break, they gathered me, my wife, and my mother-in-law in a circle on the carpeted floor of a hotel in Hawaii and taught us the game that the song is based on – a Korean drinking game.
We must have heard the song a dozen times before finally admitting to ourselves: it’s pretty catchy. I don’t often love looking back at my top songs of the year. But in this case, it was a nice way to look back on 2025.
Caroline Alphonso, health editor
My Top Artist: Dolly Parton
My Top Song: 9 to 5, Dolly Parton
My Spotify Listening Age: I’m an old soul, 77
Let’s be honest about one thing right off the bat: There is nothing cool about my Spotify Wrapped. But if you’re looking for songs you can belt out in the car with your preteen daughter, I’m here for you.
There’s nothing like the long drives back and forth to hockey practices and games when my kid just wants to sing with me more than anything else. Yes, dear reader, I’m enjoying every single minute of it.
We love a good beat. So, it’s no surprise that Golden from KPop Demon Hunters ranks right up there. As a mom to a young daughter, I love the themes of empowerment and self-acceptance. It also has catchy lyrics (I warned you there was nothing cool about my list). We’re also fans of Mystical Magical from Benson Boone, Better When I’m Dancin’ from Meghan Trainor, Fly Away from Lenny Kravitz and Three Little Birds from Bob Marley and the Wailers. And we’re known to get some of our car dancing done to Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk.
But the one that I’m most proud of for passing down to my daughter – and the one that ranks at the top of the list – is from the one and only Dolly Parton. My kid has played 9 to 5 so often that she has memorized the lyrics. If nothing else, that is a proud Mama Bear moment.
Brad Wheeler, arts reporter
My Top Artist: Bill Frisell
My Top Album: Manning Fireworks, MJ Lenderman
My Top Song: Way Back in the Way Back, Hiss Golden Messenger
My Spotify Listening Age: 72
Spotify says one of my top albums was the Who’s The Who by Numbers. Which makes me suspicious of Spotify’s numbers. I think I listened to it once. Did I put it on repeat and pass out one evening? “Cause she’s playing all night and the music’s all right …”
Spotify nailed my podcast rankings, though. Top spot went to the sports show Nothing Personal with David Samson. I follow it religiously.
Spotify says I listen to the Jays podcast Blair & Barker a lot. Guilty as charged, even though the two hosts yell and talk over each other. I really only tune in because of their top-shelf regular guests. The best of them? Why, that would be David Samson.
Aisling Murphy, theatre reporter
My Top Artist: Taylor Swift
My Top Album: The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift
My Top Song: Come Over, Noah Kahan
My Spotify Listening Age: 35
As The Globe’s theatre reporter, it should come as no surprise that I listened to a lot of musical theatre this year. But – and I’m somewhat mortified to share this – the showtunes on my Spotify Wrapped this year, just behind pop entries from the likes of Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams, were hardly the best in the canon.
Indeed, I wish I could say the musical theatre selections on my Spotify Wrapped were a touch more sophisticated. Who I’d Be from Shrek the Musical is embarrassingly high on the list – though I maintain that the writers shouldn’t have cut the song from the abridged version of the show now playing at Young People’s Theatre in Toronto. I’ve always loved Who I’d Be: Never once in the number does it feel like composer Jeanine Tesori is winking at the audience about the fact that one of her best-ever songs is sung by, uh, Shrek.
Other notable tracks on my Wrapped this year include My Green Light, an earwormy duet from the otherwise underwhelming cast recording for The Great Gatsby, and Jason Robert Brown’s demo recording of Getting over It, a scrapped ballad from his 2007 13 the Musical.
Further down on the list are some long-time favourites: Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive, sung by Raúl Esparza (who else?); Quiet, Jonathan Reid Gealt’s lovely, belty anthem about finally speaking up for something; and the opening number to Island Song, Sam Carner and Derek Gregor’s chamber musical about living in New York City.
I adore musical theatre – it is the thing I most love to write about in this world. Here’s hoping that some of the best new musical scores I heard in Canada this year – Iris (says goodbye) and After the Rain, for instance – make their way to Spotify soon.
J. Kelly Nestruck, television reporter
My Top Artist: Pokémon
My Top Album: Forever United, Kids United
My Top Song: 2b a Master, from Pokémon
I’m Listening On: Apple Music
As a parent, Apple Music Replay mainly reflects what I streamed to my six-year-old son’s Yoto player as he fell asleep for the past year. He’s in a deep Pokémon phase – and so Pokémon is listed as my top artist of the year, by a long shot.
The many TV shows and movies from the Japanese’s anime franchise’s long history have resulted in enough songs to populate a Pokémon Essentials list – and when I hear these songs through the door of my son’s bedroom I often stop and try to figure out who the songwriters were ripping off.
The Pokemon theme song really reminds me of other songs. It kept making me think of It’s Raining Men for some reason, and sometimes, out of the blue, I will sing to my son: “Pokemon! Hallelujah it’s Pokemon.”
But what the TV theme truly sounds like – and thank you to the internet for helping me figure this out – is Toto’s Hold the Line. A YouTube user’s made a mash-up of the two that’s quite something.
The Pokemon song that seems to have played the most in 2025 is called to 2b a Master – which was on the original TV soundtrack released in 1999. It sounds a bit like a Rush B-side and its lyrics are atrocious. “Gotta get my badges and my Pokeballs,” the singer sings. “Got my buddy Pikachu to help me catch them all.”
My top artists in 2025 for adults were Metric and LCD Soundsystem; I listen to their old albums while I work and occasionally have a memory pop up of being younger and dancing in a cool venue feeling cool-adjacent.
Kasia Mychajlowycz
My Top Artist: Charli xcx
My Top Album: brat, Charli xcx
My Top Song: b2b, Charli xcx
My Spotify Listening Age: 74
My dichotomous nature has been revealed. My top artist, song and album were all Charli xcx, as I’ve been keeping brat summer going for almost two years now. But the new Spotify Wrapped metric of “listening age” pegs me at a more geezer-esque 76 years old, thanks to my repeat listening of the octogenarian Ethiopian jazz behemoth Mulatu Astatke and the 1986 album by our own Beverly Glenn-Copeland called Keyboard Fantasies.