by By Lily Armstrong In an era marked by uncertainty about privacy and data sharing, streaming giant Spotify has found a way to leverage user data to drive engagement. Created in house in 2016, Spotify Wrapped is the company’s annual marketing campaign, which launches in December and presents users with various touch points of their listening data from the last year.
Spotify Wrapped packages listener data into easily sharable slides, and presents them as a feature in the Spotify app which can be watched like an Instagram story. The Wrapped feature is tailored individually to each user, and includes stats like how many minutes of music users listened to, as well as their favorite songs and artists. The feature also assigns levels of “superfan” status to users, based on their time spent listening to particular artists. Artists who share their music on Spotify can access a version of Wrapped which provides them stats about how many streams they received, and where in the world their listeners are located.
According to Spotify’s global creative director, Alex Bodman, the creative team responsible for Wrapped begins working on the feature 6 months in advance. Because the campaign is translated into 70 languages across 35 markets, the copywriting to ensure that linguistic nuances are preserved is extremely time consuming. The effort is clearly worthwhile though, as there were 425 million tweets posted about Spotify Wrapped in the first 3 days after the 2022 campaign dropped. Spotify also typically sees an uptick between 20-30% in mobile downloads in the first week of December, prior to the campaign’s yearly release. Wrapped is optimized for mobile sharing on social media platforms, and will directly prompt users to share. Many users still choose to instead share their own screenshots from Wrapped, and because Spotify cannot track screenshots, this means that Wrapped is likely shared much more widely than the company can quantify.
Beyond the direct impact for Spotify, Wrapped has become a culturally anticipated event, especially for users of Instagram and Twitter. The Wrapped slides typically begin on familiar ground for users, sharing stats about their yearly listening. With each year, Spotify branches further into microgenres and niches within user data, aiming to create a more personalized experience. In 2022, for example, Wrapped presented each user with their own unique “Listening Personality,” and introduced artist messages, thanking users for their support. Over time, the feature has become more complex and gamified, mirroring user’s preferences for more interactive experiences in the digital world. Spotify has positioned the Wrapped feature in the real world, with an FC Barcelona partnership and a word search trivia event in NYC. Wrapped can also be interacted with in the Metaverse, due to Spotify’s partnership with Roblox which allows users to explore and find merch on Spotify Island.
Spotify Wrapped has also given rise to a secondary yearly trend wherein users create and share memes or other content reacting to the campaign. For example, after the 2022 Wrapped was released, even Senator Chuck Schumer joined in the online reaction, posting a tweet in the format of one of the Wrapped slides which encouraged President Biden to cancel student debt. Other platforms have tried to create similar features to wrap up their year, to little success. In 2022, Apple’s Replay feature attempted to mimic Wrapped, but was reviewed as being a weaker concept, less visually appealing and less sharable- an overall letdown given the cultural hype and user expectations resulting from Spotify’s established campaign.
The conversation around Wrapped has thus created a social buzz and “life of its’ own” independent from Spotify which is indicative of a successful campaign. Spotify clearly understands how to use the vast amounts of data it collects about its’ listeners to create a sense of interactivity and encourage user engagement. It has also successfully positioned itself, for the past seven years and counting, to create a genuine cultural moment every year, which is extremely rare. As individual uncertainties around privacy soar, Spotify’s careful planning to leverage data without scaring users is a wonderful example to look to as we work to build interactive and engaging social media strategies for our clients this term.
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