What is wrapped?

Every year, just after Thanksgiving for our US friends (around Nov 30/Dec 1 for the rest of us!) Spotify releases “Wrapped” for all of their subscribers.

It’s an incredible marketing play by Spotify that generates a huge volume of social media traffic and conversation every year, from Wrapped itself and the anticipation leading up to it. So are there lessons from Wrapped that we can all lean on when pulling together campaigns? Can we make our content, our posts, our very concept, designed to be shared from the start?

Intel did it years ago with the “Museum of me” that allowed users to generate a personalised 3d museum walkthrough of their social media photos, connections and activity. Or the Coke “share a coke” campaign with thousands of names on bottles. People can barely resist snapping a photo to share when they find their name or that of a loved one.

Does it bring enough attention?

Spotify Wrapped generates huge amounts of social media attention and posts. For a couple of days after it drops it absolutely dominates music news and can take over the feeds of Instagram and TikTok.

Everyone gets a huge selection of points to pore over, so you can find what you want to share. Some fans share all the individual slides of their wrapped, while others share only a single slide. Being in the top 1% of listeners for a band they love matters to some people, others would be prouder of listening to a larger variety of genres.

The slides themselves are beautifully designed with bright colours, swirling shapes and an aesthetic to encourage them to be shared. Their dynamic creation lets them easily change colour, even replacing graphical elements so millions of people aren’t sharing the same image showing they loved Imagine Dragons.

What does wrapped really cost?

I’ve heard a lot of marketers call Wrapped “free advertising”, which I think is a little disingenuous. Whether deliberately or not.

Spotify, as a modern data driven company is holding onto a lot of data. Their algorithms are filled with information on what hundreds of millions of people have listened to, and how often. All of those tracks have data on everything from mood, genre, bpm and more.
Spotify has always been big on data, as you’d imagine. See here for some internal info.

Pulling together all the complex analysis for Spotify wrapped, building the custom layouts and responsive effects (wrapped is often heavily animated as you navigate it) is an immense amount of additional data. And that’s got a serious price tag attached to it. It’s possible that Spotify batches this data and update it as the year progresses to help reduce running times. Each month, quarter or even week your data could be analysed in batches and turned into a wrapped friendly format, then a smaller final run after Wrapped data closes for the year to bring it all together.

Even with those considerations, Wrapped would involve teams of people working on it exclusively, maybe even year-round. With the priorities for that data and analysis being decided sometime in November to finalise the statistics and charts to use.  I suspect there’s some manual decisions made on which things to include. A switch from total plays to minutes listened could drastically shift which artist comes to the top. Spotify could make choices like that to push “more interesting” data into feeds.

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Why does Wrapped work?

Spotify Wrapped posts can easily go viral, with celebrities or influencers with smaller audiences finding the right musical commentary to share. In the past individuals with interesting or well composed Wrapped playlists have gone viral with thousands of likes as people discovered their unique mix.

Because of the size of their audience, Spotify is one of those brands with many demographics. The breadth of Wrapped allows people to choose their own “moment to share” and this helps them talk to lots of audiences at once. For the rest of us, it’s about listening to your audience and finding what resonates with them. Mix up your content, be bold and experiment with things to find new avenues. Don’t lean on Throwback Thursday forever.

Music is such a magical and unique thing. Some people discover endlessly new tracks, and others listen to favourites and artists from their formative years for the rest of their life. We all connect with something as simple as songs in a thousand ways. For me, music helps me remember and imagine. The song I listened to during a breakup, or that was shared from a long-lost love. A beloved song I’ve listened to for years gets a new memory when I share it with a new friend, and now I’ll always remember the day they asked for my favourite song.

Can I control my wrapped?

Knowing how wrapped works can make it a little easier to influence and make sure you’re not seeing unexpected results. Wrapped counts everything you play from January 1^st through to sometime in mid-November (this gives them time to calculate wrapped, and it also excludes a period filled with Xmas songs on loop and you spending a month relistening to your favourite Wrapped tracks).

It’ll count plays only on your account. So if you’re a family admin, everyone will see their own Wrapped.

Wrapped counts actual plays of a song, and not playtime. So those epic length Meatloaf and Lynyrd Skynyrd tracks won’t bias things too much. There’s no evidence that liking or favouriting a song has any additional influence outside of those stats.

Songs that play for less than 30 seconds won’t be counted, so you’ve got plenty of time to skip tracks on the radio or AI DJ that don’t sit right for you.

And if you’re looking to save your Wrapped next year from that one playlist your toddler has on repeat all you need to do is open the playlist and click on the 3 dots for “More options” and select” Exclude from your taste profile”.

Here’s to another year of Spotify wrapped. An incredibly complex marketing campaign with probably a massive price tag behind it. But with a huge portion of the digital world counting down to sharing theirs I would say the return on investment is a good one.

Is it Spotify Wrapped day yet? Or just another Manic Monday.