And the basics of its hyper-personalized music streaming service
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Jingle bells ring, the first snowflakes fall and cities are dressing up with shimmering lights. Christmas time is finally here!
Isn’t it?
However, for Spotify users — and almost anyone else in the world — these early December days also carry Spotify Wrapped!
It has become an annual tradition, marking the change of seasons the same way beloved cultural staples like Mariah Carey marks the Christmas holidays.
Since its launch in 2008, Spotify has been an unquestionable success. It was first founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon as a way to deal with the problem of music piracy.
Ever since it was first launched, Spotify has experienced exponential growth in both active users and premium members. According to Statista, Spotify has today 195 million premium users — a 930% more than it did in 2015.
Spotify’s first big success lies in the extensive user account customization that has been made possible since the very first day. Spotify encourages users to create their own playlists, essentially building an entire library of music on their accounts.
In fact, over the past years, I have created many playlists with thousands of tracks assigned to my account — most of them I cannot even recall.
Today I can’t imagine leaving Spotify and recreating those playlists on another platform — or just losing them altogether. Me as a user have invested way too much time into Spotify and, as a result, I’m locked into paying for a premium account — quite happily, too.
However, Spotify’s further customization of its service didn’t stop here. Personalized online streaming is the new thing today, but Spotify was the first one to make this breakthrough. And this is precisely what made Spotify different from any other music platform — or any other streaming platform at all.
Don’t search or scroll for your favorite songs, Spotify will take care of it using Big Data — by Priya Dalani
As Chloé Currie writes, Spotify relies on AI and machine learning algorithms to give a personalized — and unique — experience to each of its users via two main features. Let’s dig deeper into them both.
If you already use the Spotify app, I bet you already know what Discover Weekly is. This feature was first launched in 2012 under the name Discover, and its main goal was to create a playlist with users’ favorite artists using all the data that Spotify had about their listening habits — and taste.
However, this feature matured over time by recommending more songs of a similar genre after all songs of a playlist had been played. This effectively simplified the way users could find — and discover — new music.
This feature finally evolved into today’s Discover Weekly which provides a personalized playlist every week aligned to the users’ taste — and which only includes songs that they have not heard before.
This Spotify’s very first hyper-personalized feature was designed to keep users engaged with the platform and to consume more music. However, it didn’t get new users — or any organic growth for the company.
This is where the second — and biggest success of the company so far — steps in.
Spotify Wrapped started in 2015 as Your Year in Music, a feature for users to look back through their top music and artists alongside a playful little slideshow with specific statistics about their listening habits.
Ever since, every early December, Spotify sends each of its subscribers a report based on data gathered about their music consumption in the past year. While becoming quite popular, Your Year in Music didn’t quite go viral until it was upgraded two years later to the customizable, jazzy graphic release it is now.
Spotify’s Wrapped is an example of data done right. Music lovers are treated to different categories like their 5 most listened artists, the amount of time they spent listening, and fun facts like the first time they listened to their top song, last year’s Audio Aura, which showed listeners their top two moods based on their listening behavior, and this year’s Listening Personality.
“The data is our truth and our source of insights.” —Khartoon Weiss, Spotify’s former global head,
Consumer interest in Wrapped isn’t just about the data itself, but the way that Spotify personalizes and presents this data to them. This is hyper-personalization at its finest, as each user is served up a story where they are the main character.
However, the genius does not stop just here. When subscribers receive their Wrapped report, it’s packaged and ready to be shared with their friends in a few clicks. And just like that, Spotify creates a trend.
So, the obvious question now is…
Why the Wrapped feature is such a powerful strategy?
Unlike Weekly discover, the Wrapped feature allows Spotify to get new users and experience organic growth. According to market analytics firm MoEngage, Wrapped gives Spotify a big boost in new installs. Its mobile app downloads increased by 21% in the first week of December 2020.
As stated by Techcrunch, while in 2017 only 30 million Spotify users accessed Wrapped, by last year, that figure had grown to more than 120 million with a corresponding 60 million shares across social platforms.
However, not many companies can be proud of having created a time of the year when everyone is buzz-talking about them. Spotify has managed to accomplish the most rarest of things — create a genuine cultural moment every year, a day on which everyone on the internet seems to be talking about the same thing.
Now you might be wondering, why so?
User-generated content is a big reason behind Spotify Wrapped’s success — all social media noise about it makes any consumer want to switch their go-to audio streaming platform to Spotify and get their own Wrapped story. As users jump ship from competitors like Apple Music or Deezer to Spotify, Spotify experiences a growth in app downloads.
It is worth noting direct competitors are trying to catch up. This year Apple improved its own version — Replay — to compete directly with Spotify’s Wrapped. Even though its features were further enhanced, two main points are still missing. First, Replay needs to be checked using a browser, making it harder to check — users are usually lazy. Secondly, Apple’s version of Wrapped is just not as jazzy and as sharable. Deezer is doing it better than Apple with its called feature #MyDeezerYear, but once again, it just feels like a watered-down version of Spotify’s Wrapped.
Users seem to love Spotify’s Wrapped feature, and this is because it is not seen as an ad, but more like a way to interact with others using a universal subject — Music.
New users acquired by Spotify this way will stick for longer as they want their own Wrapped story, making them more likely to use Spotify for the entire year.
Spotify has managed to create a global audience — and dominate the music streaming industry — by taking advantage of all its collected data and generating hyper-personalized features that users enjoy.
Spotify Wrapped has proven to be a great way to acquire new users and make them stick around for longer. By making it easier to share Wrapped stories on social media, Spotify showcased a perfect example of a feature that allows organic growth as well.
Hence, Spotify’s Wrapped not only allows users to have a look back at their past year but allows non-users to discover what they are missing — suffering the so-called FOMO.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! ✨
