Why Spotify Wrapped goes viral every year: Binghamton University experts weigh in
Binghamton UniversityIt may be a wild concept to some, but getting to know someone’s musical tastes used to involve getting to know them, maybe meeting up for coffee, having a conversation. Now, you just have to follow them on social media and wait until early December, when they inevitably share their Spotify Wrapped to social media, allowing you to discover they are fans of Goblincore, Pink Pilates Princess Pop, and Coastal Grandmother Country Mashup.
That’s what users on Spotify get presented with at the tail-end of each year – their listening habits on full display… the good, the bad, and the straight-up bizarre. It’s become the “Super Bowl” of music listening platforms, and Debjit Gupta and Soo Hyung (Ralph) Park, associate professors at the Binghamton University School of Management, have insights as to why.
Launched in 2016, Wrapped generates billions of social media impressions each year. Gupta estimates Wrapped creates potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising, where the users do a majority of the legwork in promotion. But how did Spotify turn something as mundane as user data and turn it into an eagerly-awaited musical report card?
Music streaming content that creates emotional throughlines
Spotify definitely was not the first music/content platform to use data collected from users to generate a “year in review” – iTunes sent out emails on most-listened-to artists and YouTube Rewinds looked at top creators. Spotify Wrapped was one of the first to create a narrative about each individual user’s listening habits on a hyper-personal basis, and it was certainly the first to do it well, Gupta says.
“Here in this case, because it’s fully customized, everyone gets unique information about themselves for the past year, so that keeps it exciting for people,” Gupta said. “Every year, you’re not listening to what others have done, or you’re not seeing other people’s information. You’re seeing information about yourself.”
It’s easy to look at Wrapped and see the artwork that is included and view visual branding as the fishing pole that reels people in, but Wrapped’s success is more nuanced than that. First, the content curated for users is directly derived from the data Spotify collects from them, meaning not only is the content simpler for Spotify to create due to already using material in their possession, as Gupta noted, but also the user is technically a “co-creator” of the content. This connection to the content creates an attachment. If I’m a Spotify listener, looking at Wrapped, I know that I had a direct hand in creating what I’m seeing, just by listening to music.
“If they share it, that serves as content from Spotify, but it’s actually indirectly made by users. The user has some inputs, regardless of if they knew or not,” Park said. “It’s not really a traditional co-creation of you invite consumers to develop your product, but it touches that concept.”
Park also adds that Spotify’s attention to not just showing your stats, but creating storylines further deepens the bond between users and their yearly Wrapped content. Seeing a list of top listened-to artists is simply knowledge, but seeing how your habits have changed over a period of time, what artists you’ve just discovered, which ones have been with you for years/decades, etc. creates an emotional throughline for the music listener.
“I found that this Spotify services some narratives inside of this Wrapped content, compared to even my iPhone,” Park said. “They group the photos that I took in a similar period, and with some default music, gives me the content, but it’s not really a story. It’s just a group of photos with nice music. But this Spotify service has a story. It uses the timeline-based approach sequentially, and it gives a narrative. I think that’s one thing that makes this particularly effective.”
Wrapped also entices users by turning music-listening into a game. Gupta explained how websites and apps of all forms have integrated “gamification” into their platforms over the past several years in some way – whether it be through achievements, badges, leaderboards, etc. Spotify 2024 included “user archetypes”, or creating a listener personality profile for users, along with informing users about how they stack up against others as a listener of a specific artist (i.e. a user being in the top 1% of Artist X listeners worldwide). Gupta also noted how recent iterations of Wrapped include short videos from artists thanking their most devoted fans for listening.
“It’s definitely to encourage people to interact with the content more,” Gupta said. ”I would like to be the top listener for my favorite band or my favorite artist, right? That has some sort of a “take an action” component as well.”
The implication is that knowing where you stack up against others or striving for a specific achievement will get users to interact more with the platform. They’re striving for top listenership. And how do users get it? By using Spotify more.
Creating anticipation, free advertising, and FOMO
Spotify Wrapped is a marketing tool. The 2023 Wrapped generated more than 2 billion social media impressions alone for the company.
This happens in many ways. For one, it helps Spotify to a great extent that it helped pioneer this form of end-of-year review content, and that fact creates a “first-mover” effect. Park notes that this “first-mover” effect gives Spotify the edge year after year, despite the fact that more platforms have replicated Spotify’s approach to using user data to create content.
“When a firm pioneers in a certain category or service, especially when it comes to a repetitive purchasing product, not a one-shot product, it can have customers on their brand, attached to their brand, especially in the Internet-enabled environment,” Park said.
Park also says user sharing that engaging content itself amplifies this attachment via network effect. He explained how since Spotify is a first mover, the company has built a larger network of consumers sharing Wrapped content, rather than content from competitors, and those who share Wrapped content can stand to benefit more from sharing that content due to Spotify’s large user base.
Additionally, although Spotify Wrapped typically releases the week following Thanksgiving, Spotify generally does not promote it in advance of its release. No trailers, no save-the-dates. Not knowing when Wrapped will appear in your app just adds to the anticipation.
“That’s a marketing strategy built in there. If you knew it was on that day, you would wait for it, but suppose you were hoping it would come out this Wednesday, but it’s not. Then expectation builds up,” Gupta said. “I think there’s a lot of consumer psychology aspects built into the entire system.”
When you mention social media, FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is not far behind. FOMO is not a new concept; numerous studies have explored how that fear is baked into social media use. However, Gupta notes that FOMO is clearly at play here. Wrapped is a much-anticipated social media event each year, with millions of users looking forward to displaying their habits and seeing their friends’ as well.
Why users stay despite data privacy concerns
Despite its popularity, Wrapped has not existed without controversy. Spotify received criticism from users for its reported use of artificial intelligence in creating the 2024 edition, and many users also use the uptick in Spotify mentions around Wrapped releases to highlight their disdain for how Spotify unfairly compensates artists that upload to their platform.
The elephant in the room for many people lies in what enables Wrapped to exist in the first place: data sharing. It’s a topic that is certainly not specific to Spotify, as many internet platforms have been criticized for the same, but it’s still a sore point for some. Users give the green light for Spotify to collect and use data how they see fit at signup, but for many, the concept of a company taking their data and using it makes them feel uneasy. When Wrapped releases, though, many people tend to be a little more okay with their data being utilized, for a while, at least. One reason for this, Gupta said, is that the user becomes more of an active participant in the usage of their data.
“Wrapped is basically just the act of sharing your data with others… You’re giving out your data to everyone to look through, right? It’s all of your listening history for the past year,” Gupta said. “Obviously, there are layers to it. Spotify makes the exercise fun. You have attractive visuals, different sorts of ranks.”
Another reason that Park points to as why users stick around despite data concerns is the emotional connection to music. Many users have spent years, and in some cases, even more than a decade, compiling their music and curating their playlists. These days, there are migration platforms that make the process of taking your playlists from one platform to another easier than in the past. This means that switching platforms isn’t as much a hassle as it used to be.
However, as Park said, the memories built up through music over the years could be a big factor in people staying on Spotify, and Wrapped is a yearly reminder of that connection.
“Especially in this type of customized storytelling service, Spotify Wrapped, we can feel that it really has our history of our listening behavior. In that case, it’s non-contractual switching. We can just switch it. We can just lose $10 – it’s not a big deal. But non-contractual switching, the data it has, the time I devoted to this platform, and this platform has my memories,” Park said. “I think that will be more emphasized, that effect is more amplified when Spotify gives a service like Spotify Wrapped, because it really feels like it has my memory.”