Spotify Wrapped : The Annual Viral Campaign by Spotify

Spotify Wrapped is one of the impressive marketing campaigns by Spotify that releases annually at the end of the year around December. The campaign was introduced in 2016 with 30 million people experiencing the campaign, compared to the growth in the last 2021 increased to more than 120 million users. Spotify Wrapped allows the users and producers on the platform to view a compilation of data about the trend and the users’ activity on Spotify over the past year. The activities include top songs, top artists/albums/podcasts, top genres, minutes listened, listening personalities, audio aura, and the special message from the favorite artist to the fans. Not only about data itself, but Spotify personalizes the data to its users and presents it in clever ways with interactive visual design, changing themes, and colors to keep it new, exciting and intended to boost engagement of audiences to share the campaign, which so benefits Spotify itself.

The campaign can be found by clicking the banner on the homepage of the app or website and then it will appear as a Wrapped story that shows users’ history in a year on Spotify. For instance, “You explored 48 different genres” and continued in showing the top 5 genres of each user. According to this, Spotify Wrapped also provides a share button underneath every section which is a shareable card to encourage the audiences post it to social media using hashtags #SpotifyWrapped. This campaign successfully has created a new culture, where it has turned listening to music into a competition and show off their tastes in music that lead to the fear of missing out (FOMO). Where consequently, the users compete to increase the time music listening on the platform and satisfy the users, artists, and indeed, the company. Other than that, the campaign is inspiring other platforms to have similar annual data features of user activities in the app, such as YouTube and Apple Music. However, Spotify Wrapped remains the crown jewel of flexing one’s musical taste.

A tweet had been circulating with a rumor that Spotify would send fans personal messages from their favorite artists, which seemed impossible. However, alongside Spotify Wrapped last year, a section called “Your Artist Messages” has been released, including videos of artists thanking the fans for listening right after the wrapped story ends. Successfully, through this event, it creates the satisfying bonding between the fans and the artist.

What is more exciting is not only users posting their wrapped card, but most of the artists also share the card on social media about their total listeners, total countries, total streams and total hours streaming of the artists’ songs. In other words, many artists also participated in this campaign which directly promoted Spotify.

Most people admit that Spotify’s marketing is often out-of-the box, especially for this annual campaign,“Spotify Wrapped”. The way Spotify faces the hardest challenges with the campaign every year where it has to work in different languages and a huge range of markets around the globe. “It needs to work everywhere, but it also needs to work in every size,” says Rasmus. “So it needs to be thought about in a very systematic way. But at the same time, it needs to be expressive and original and celebratory. It’s this constant push and pull between systematic design thinking, but also organic and expressive design thinking.” Spotify Wrapped is a complete outstanding marketing strategy of collecting, presenting, and sharing data originally with free advertising

The impact of this genius campaign is great, as it taps into a human truth that loves to learn about ourselves, even from our music tastes and personality as a music listener. In addition, the customer is at the heart of this campaign and is always looking forward to it as an annual celebration that could remind the users of their memorable moments with Spotify.

References 

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-wrapped/

https://theconversation.com/spotify-wrapped-how-sharing-your-music-tastes-can-drive-feelings-of-fomo-196825

https://www.moengage.com/blog/spotify-wrapped-2020-app-downloads-engagement/