The holiday season is upon us, which brings along the best present of all—Spotify Wrapped. If you live under a rock or insist on being a part of the small subset of the population who still subjects themselves to the inferiority of Apple Music, Spotify Wrapped is a personalized compiled set of listening data that Spotify releases to each user at the end of the year. Here is why it is the greatest marketing strategy of all time…
We’re all a bit egotistical. Media companies like Buzzfeed have thrived off our eagerness to define our personalities, even to the extent that we might click on a quiz to find out what pizza topping we are. Our music taste is just another way to sum up our personality, and it often is our most prized possession. Whether your identity lies in your obsession with a certain artist, pride in your underground music taste, or insistence that you found a hit before it became popular, you want the world to know. That’s the essence of our social media accounts—to allow our followers a glimpse into our lives.
Upon releasing each users’ individualized listening data, Spotify also provides shareable graphics so that you can boast your top songs and artists, total listening time, and percentage ranking in an artist’s total listeners as you please. Thus, in the days after Spotify releases our musical year-in-reviews, almost everyone uploads those graphics to their social media pages. Spotify then has almost all of its consumers promoting the app for them, enticing their peers to download Spotify so that they might participate in Spotify Wrapped the following year.
These data summaries are not just for everyday users, but for creators too. Spotify will rank artists on various charts and compile their total amount of streams each given year. These artists proceed to share this data with pride, luring more people to the music streaming platform just because they saw the green logo associated with an artist they idolize.
Not only does this marketing strategy draw in more consumers in an authentic and candid manner, but it also causes heightened user interaction with the app throughout the year. In anticipation of this yearly wrap-up, Spotify users are constantly streaming music. They are also hesitant to switch to any other digital music service, knowing that it would prevent them from participating in this cultural phenomenon every December. Lastly, Spotify Wrapped provides each user with curated playlists of their top 100 songs, “missed hits” from the year, and music that dives deeper into their favorite genres and artists. This facilitates even more music discovery on the app, and the cycle ever continues in Spotify’s favor.
Let’s just say, the entire marketing team at Spotify deserves a raise.