If you have not jumped on to ‘Spotify Wrapped‘ before you read this, do it now.
I’ll be here when you get back.
Pretty cool hey.
‘Spotify Wrapped‘ is a year-in-review of your listening habits. The summary captures your digital musical thumbprint, recalling the artists, songs, albums, and podcasts that filled your ears all year.
And it’s a viral phenomenon.
This unique, exclusive, time sensitive and artfully presented content is optimised for sharing on social media.
Decoding the virality of Spotify Wrapped
Its appeal taps our desire to share and compare.
Alex Bodman, Vice President, and Global Executive Creative Director at Spotify, credits the success of Spotify Wrapped to the fact that “We weren’t just talking about ourselves… We were giving people an interesting way to talk about themselves.” (Variety)
Spotify Wrapped gains new features each year.
In 2022, it provided a ‘listening personality’ feature, inspired by the Meyers-Briggs personality test. In 2021 it created ‘audio aura’, a feature that identified a user’s mood based on listening trends. In 2023, Spotify Wrapped includes ‘Me in 2023’, a feature that assigns you one out of 12 characters and ‘Sound Town’, which matches you to a city with similar listening and artist affinity.
It’s engaging. It’s brilliant. And it’s all yours. As it rolls from screen to screen, you stay captured by the data and design.
What can we learn?
Virality is the holy grail in digital marketing.
Significant impact, reach and velocity achieved through emotion not dollars.
But it is elusive.
The lesson of Spotify Wrapped is that personalisation, community, and experience matter.
In this case, the topic (music) is of widespread common interest, the content, which is uniquely yours, locates you in our global community and its presentation is visually engaging and compelling. It is also designed so it is easy to circulate.
By putting customers at the centre of the idea, Spotify has encouraged them to do the work.
But the content had to be good and it had to be interesting. It needed something special and it has that in spades.
So, a round of applause for this one. In our office, when the opportunity was announced, everyone reached for their phones, completed the exercise and it held the room in conversation for 10 minutes. Nice job Spotify
If you are wondering, I listened to 10 genres, mostly Australian, I’m most like Adelaide and I’m a vampire. Who knew?
I love music. And I love Spotify Wrapped. Well played.
