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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

It’s my birthday today. And I have a cool piece for you. I had a few things planned to write but they weren’t filling me up with energy, so I decided to sit down and think about something that would fire me right up to work on.

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STRATEGISM 🔮

Strategism: Unwrapping Spotify Wrapped

Building a brand is about creating memorability—and yes that means exactly what it sounds like—’the quality of being likely to be remembered or worth remembering.’ Some brands are able to capture attention in incredible ways for a short period. Think the sensation that was Pokémon GO, or Red Bulls stratospheric jump with Felix Baumgartner.

But to create something that is more durable. Something that your community looks forward to, and grows year and year after year. Well that’s something altogether different again. Well the Swedish streaming giant, Spotify, founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon have done just that.

The annual Spotify Wrapped campaign has been such a viral phenom that nearly 10 years later it’s as strong as ever. Today we will be diving into why that is, and the psychological frameworks underlying it’s success.

What is ‘Spotify Wrapped’

Spotify Wrapped was launched in 2016 to little fanfare (1 comment, 15 likes on the announcement tweet), providing users with detailed breakdowns of their listening habits over the past year. Wrapped analyses billions of streams to deliver a personalised summary of a user’s music activity, highlighting most-played songs, top artists, favourite genres, and total listening time. This process can be equal parts invigorating and embarrassing.

_{(No way I listened to Arianna Grande for more than 156 hours this year?)}

In addition to individual insights, Wrapped goes global, showcasing worldwide trends like the most-streamed songs, artists, and albums. Over time, Spotify has added features such as ‘Listening Personality,’ which categorises you based on your discovery and listening patterns, and ‘Audio Day,’ which breaks down the moods of their music choices throughout the day.

The feature is built for shareability. Its colourful design, interactive slides, and integration with social media scream SHARE ME SHARE ME SHARE ME from the rooftops to it’s users. By 2023, over 60 million users had engaged with Wrapped, leading to billions of impressions across platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

At its core, Spotify Wrapped is a data-driven feature designed to delight users and reinforce their connection to the platform. It’s a simple concept executed at mega-scale, using personalisation and data to create a viral, end-of-year tradition.

Why it works (growth)

Earned media explosion

Spotify Wrapped generates a massive-organic-buzzy-vibestorm every December as users flood social media with their Wrapped stats, turning them into an White Walkeresque army of brand advocates. The visually striking and easily Story-able format is meant to spark viral sharing on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This creates a wave of free advertising, amplifying Spotify’s reach without much ad spend at all.

By dominating the cultural zeitgeist every, Spotify makes sure Wrapped becomes a trending topic, reaching current users and potential newbies. In 2023, Wrapped content generated over 2 billion impressions globally, with more than 90 million users sharing their stats online. Media outlets like The New York Times and The Verge also routinely cover Wrapped, giving a huge boost to it’s earned media.

Cost effective acquisition

Wrapped drives user acquisition by leveraging its virality, attracting non-users through the FOMO created by the aforementioned social media vibestorm. When Wrapped takes over our social feeds, it triggers curiosity and a desire among non-users to experience it themselves. In other words; the coolest party is happening, and your free ticket waits for you in the App Store.

This effectively turns Spotify’s existing users into brand super ambassadors, showcasing Spotify’s value to their followers. Its success in converting FOMO into YOLO (new users) lowers Spotify’s cost per acquisition during this period, making it a crackingly cost-effective growth tool.

Cultural relevance

Wrapped has evolved into a recurring cultural moment that people actively anticipate. And with the media coverage it is afforded, it amplifies the reach far beyond a few social shares. It spawns memes and trends that extend the conversation, while influencing how people think about their year in music.

The wave of copycats—which we’ll discuss shortly—from other platforms only further reinforces Spotify's position as lead innovator and cultural tastemaker.

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Why it works (retention)

Personalisation at scale

Wrapped uses its vast pools of data to craft a hyper-personalised experience for every user. By analysing a year’s worth of listening habits, Spotify creates a unique story for each user that highlights their top songs, favourite artists, and listening trends. This level of personalisation is not only a nice delight to users but also reinforces a feeling of ‘we see you’ by the feature, which is a key driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Value reenforcement

Wrapped also does a great job of reminding users of the value Spotify provides throughout the year. Obviously, it showcases unique insights and personalised stats, but it also shows how Spotify isn’t just a music player but a platform that understands and celebrates its users. For Premium subscribers, Wrapped reinforces the value of their investment by spotlighting features like personalised playlists and ad-free listening. Free-tier users are subtly encouraged to upgrade when they see the full potential of what Spotify offers.

Investment effect & community belonging

Wrapped visualises accumulated listening time, playlist creation, and personal library growth in compelling ways that make switching platforms feel like losing valuable personal history, and if I am honest—a total ball-ache.

It does a great job to quantify engagement while showing the progression of music discovery, making users acutely aware of how much they've ‘invested’ in the platform beyond just their subscription fees. The best part about Wrapped though, is how it brings people together.

It's like a massive show-and-tell where everyone gets to share their music taste. You end up finding friends who streamed the same obscure artist or played that one song as many times as you did. It turns something as personal as music taste into this shared experience that everyone gets excited about.

When the copycats come ‘meowing’

Like all good strategies in tech, when something is working you should probably assume you have a very small window of time before the copycats come a meowing. Take a look at a handful of the examples of copycat campaigns launched since Spotify hit go with Wrapped in 2016.

To be honest, I like them all. And hey, Imitation is the highest form of flattery right?

How / Can you can apply this

The unfortunate thing about Spotify Wrapped is, it’s not as if we can all go out there next week and create our own version of the campaign. Why? Because, data.

For those of you that are bummed about the missing data lake inside of your startup, my buddy Nico, who wrote about Spotify Wrapped recently highlighted something interesting. He shared how other companies are doing the ‘value recap email’ well. Sure, you may not capture the cultural equivalent of lightning in a bottle, but it’s something, and it works.

Summary / Future

Let me start by saying, Spotify ain’t going nowhere anytime soon. They are a behemoth, who’s execution makes me think old Danny Ek, might be on Bradley Cooper’s ‘limitless’ diet. Even so, cracks are slowly beginning to fray inside of Spotify’s annual Warped campaign. While prepping for this post I pretty quickly stumbled up articles from the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Wired, all poo-poo’ing this years campaign.

Whatever the future of Wrapped is, it should be celebrated as a once-in-a-lifetime campaign. It’s a campaign that broke across borders, infiltrated every social platform and became routine discussion at the water cooler.

Kudos to Daniel Ek, and kudos to Spotify. This is the type of campaign that founders all across the world can really only dream of.

Extra strategism

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BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Ever hit a creative wall or found yourself just staring at a blank page?—I sure have. That’s why I loved this episode by Huberman Lab so much. Been trying to science my way through life lately, so it’s super cool to get the lowdown on how creativity works and what to do to master it.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

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TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

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See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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