Spotify Unwrapped: At the heart of the company’s biggest marketing campaign

It’s the season to face the music, literally. Are you embarrassed to be a full adult with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” as your number 1 song? Maybe you’re a proud Swiftie to be in the top 1% of her listeners. Do you feel superior that your best artists are made up of independent cohorts that no one has heard of? Were you dancing to hell with Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” as the soundtrack? Or have you sympathized with other parents whose children have taken over their Spotify accounts? Shit, maybe it’s both. Who spent the most time listening to music this year anyway?

It doesn’t matter if it’s fresh-faced teenagers, aging hipsters, hip-hop heads, or even Gen-Xers and Boomers who “don’t care about your Spotify Wrapped” as December begins , the Spotify brand is at the forefront of countless music fan tongues – or more accurately, all over their social media accounts. What started as a simple data sharing to reward existing Spotify listeners by showing what they played the previous year – and how much – is now a holiday tradition in its own right.

“The genesis of this actually dates back to 2013, when a few smart people at Spotify were like, ‘Hey, we have this data, would anyone be interested?'” says Alex Bodman, vice president and director global creative executive at Spotify.”It was a modest first effort, but it was very clear that people found it compelling.”It was a snapshot of their data that no one had been able to provide before, and users from Spotify ate it up. This “humble” first iteration started as “Year in Review” and morphed into visually appealing share cards flooding social media platforms that show off the best songs, artists, genres , minutes spent listening, and more. “In 2015, I think we were thrilled to have 5 million visitors to the site – that was huge,” Bodman recalls. “But the real shock was more ‘a million social shares.’

Sharing this snapshot of data is what propelled Spotify to the crossroads of technology, music and culture. “Suddenly we started to realize that this was an amazing way to get our passionate users screaming from the brand’s rooftops,” Bodman continues.

He’s not kidding: In 2020, Spotify Wrapped saw over 60 million shares from 90 million users, and that’s only counting what Spotify can measure, because screenshots aren’t something that anyone can measure. company can follow.

“I’m sure we’d all love to sit down and say it was a genius marketing stunt, but when it was first built it was a game of loyalty,” he says. “I don’t think we had any idea that people would want to share it so much.”

At a time when big tech companies are often criticized for in-depth monitoring of user habits and data, Spotify touted it as a fun feature that listeners can share with their friends. Spotify users expect personalization; for the streaming giant to know his musical tastes to improve his experience. The longer leash given by users “could be an extension of that”.

And that may be the secret ingredient to the overall success of the Spotify Wrapped campaign. In a music world where media conglomerates and radio stations are going national, Spotify Wrapped, despite being owned by a global company, has found a way to make it even more personal. “We weren’t just talking about ourselves,” Bodman says. “We were giving people an interesting way to talk about themselves.”

The Spotify Wrapped team makes it a point to keep the familiar – like minutes spent listening and most played songs – then adding new features to keep it fresh and culturally relevant every year. This year, those features included the soundtrack of your life if it was a movie, a quiz about two truths and a lie, and your “audio aura,” the latter of which divides your tastes into two moods, as opposed to to genders, with colors to match. They even brought in a professional aura expert to help execute the idea.

Although Spotify collects data for the Wrapped campaign throughout the year – from January to just a few weeks before the December 1st launch – the idea for the theme and visual creation kicks off around the middle of the year for draw on current cultural moments. Then it’s about connecting what’s culturally relevant and visually appealing to Spotify Wrapped. As Bodman says, “It’s the magic of marrying madness with math.”

Sometimes creativity leads the way, at others it’s the technical side. “Sometimes the idea comes from a hundred people who have worked on it over the years at Spotify, and sometimes it will be the product team showing us a new feature they have.” One of those features this year is the ability to share to TikTok and a green screen.

As TikTok’s popularity grew during the pandemic, Spotify kept the platform top of mind. It’s hard not to notice the phrases pulled from the TikTok dictionary as you scroll through the Wrapped presentation: “You deserve a playlist as long as your skincare routine”; “you have always understood the mission”; “if 2021 was a movie, you were the main character”; “In a year like 2021, even your music gets a vibe test,” to name a few.

One would assume that a group of marketing executives sat down around a table and decided to target Gen Z with TikTok verbiage, but that was not the case. “Really, there were probably two writers working on the whole experiment, and it was just their sensibility; their personalities come through,” says Bodman. “We try to get different writers to work on it every year. so that there’s a sense of personality and it doesn’t seem too calculated.” He also mentioned that they hire very culturally sensitive writers, and it wouldn’t be surprising to find that some of the younger writers live on TikTok.

Music creators are also getting in on the action with Artist Wrapped. Major artists like HER, BTS and Maroon 5 happily display their Artist Wrapped cards thanking their fans, while some smaller artists, like Mazie, credit Spotify for helping them grow. “You know, I don’t have access to a big infrastructure within a major label system,” Mazie told Newsweek. “Established artists can use their resources to access various data points and analytics, but I can’t. Yet, by just putting music on Spotify platform, now I can get these things. It offers so much more transparency.

That Wrapped has multiple points of contact – connecting music fans to each other, artists to their fanbases, or simply providing the opportunity to laugh at a shared Harry Styles obsession – is one of its truly unique traits. and provides the type of user engagement platform. , while letting the algorithm do the work. Someone might call that genius.