By Claire Leibowitz
As per usual, social media flooded with screenshots of Spotify Wrapped on Wednesday, November 29, with users flaunting their top five songs and artists. This mix of old and new features seem to enhance Spotify’s popularity, according to TIME. In 2022, 156 million users interacted with Wrapped.
Spotify collects users’ listening data from January to a “few weeks prior to launch,” in order to provide the most accurate data. Songs and podcasts must be listened to for 30 minutes or more to be considered for Wrapped, and the number of artist and album streams are counted based on unique listens. The Swedish music platform first came out with the concept in 2015, calling it “Year in Music.” As time has gone on, the graphics have become more kitschy, the data more nuanced, and the features more engaging.
New Features
This year, Spotify boasted a variety of new features and items to show off. They claim the campaign is “a celebration of the realest moments that defined your year on Spotify,” including top songs, artists, albums, and podcasts.
The Me in 2023 features gave each user 1 of 12 distinct listening personalities related to prior tastes and habits in music: Vampire, Alchemist, Time Traveler, Cyclops, Luminary, Mastermind, Robotocist, Shapeshifter, Collector, Hunter, Fanatic, and Hypnotist. These traits embody a variety of listening styles, like dark and moody for the Vampire, light and upbeat music for the Luminary, and listening primarily to users’ own playlists for the Collector. The complete list of descriptions can be found here.
Did Spotify say your Sound Town is Burlington, Vermont? Or what about San Luis Obispo, California? Spotify’s Sound Towns “[match] you to a city based on your listening and artist affinity.” Despite 1,300 possible towns, some stood out more than others. San Luis Obispo attracted 0.8% of Spotify listeners, with the city’s X account posting a comment and the city’s representative Salud Carbajal joking about new constituents. Burlington, Vermont attracted 0.6% of Spotify users, and along with Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkely, California, became associated with LGBTQ+ listeners.
Finally, Spotify listed users’ top 5 genres in the form of a sandwich. Last year, the platform used an astronaut graphic. Although not the most popular Spotify metric to post, it did provide a unique take on the way users listen. According to Mashable, “the bigger the portion of the sandwich, the more you listened to that genre.”
Spotify vs. Apple
Apple’s Replay 2023 launched on November 28, just a day before Spotify. However, Apple’s first Replay released in 2019, a few years after the first official Wrapped. Both boast slightly different features.
First, Apple Replay is not directly available in the app, but rather in the Apple Music Webpage. The stats that the platform releases are interesting, even tracking milestones, like when a user streams a song 1,000 times, but aren’t as graphic as the Wrapped series.
Further, Apple does not provide a summary, and they make it harder to share online. Spotify lets users directly share information to platforms or their camera roll, whereas Apple makes users take screenshots.
The Impact of Wrapped
A variety of companies began to release their versions of a year-in-review once Spotify started gaining popularity.
BeReal, the once-a-day social media platform to capture reality, created a series last year that wasn’t quite popular – the buggy launch wasn’t available for all users at the same time, and it breezed through every single photo people had taken too quickly. Beli, a restaurant ranking app, created a summary of the year called Plated, emphasizing favorite restaurants, cuisines, most similar friends, and more. Grubhub, The Washington Post, and even Nintendo have hopped on the trend.
Marketers can learn a lot from Wrapped – Spotify essentially is advertised by millions of users in a single day when they share their yearly stats, driving more app downloads and switches. This provides a variety of lessons for companies, like the importance of sharing, the excitement behind ritualized content, keeping things fun, and sustaining success.
Wrapped is a kind of marketing that helps benefit both Spotify and its own listeners to create a unique brand, showcase their interests, and stand out from others.
