What you’ll read: In using rich customer data, Spotify’s Wrapped allows listeners to compare their habits and preferences with their peer’s—a catalyst for social sharing.
Every business wants to provide personalized customer experiences, but few can fully achieve that goal. To become truly personalized, brands must orient their product, service, and support infrastructure around customers in a way that’s both individual and scalable — a difficult task, even with today’s technology.
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One of the few modern brands to strike this balance is Spotify, which recently delivered a stellar end-of-year experience in the form of Spotify Wrapped. Let’s take a closer look at what Wrapped gets right about providing a powerfully personal service.
Spotify Wrapped first took shape in 2015 as “Year in Music,” a statistical summary of subscriber listening habits and favorite artists. While the event generated interest, it lacked the widespread appeal Spotify needed as a market leader. Over the following years, Spotify refined Year in Music to make the experience unique — producing custom graphics, engaging copy, and an Instagram Stories-like presentation. Today, Wrapped is a colorful and vibrant event that subscribers look forward to each year, as much a holiday fixture as holiday playlists themselves.
Curiously enough, Spotify Wrapped’s current form isn’t just personal — it’s also social. While it’s fun to revisit music you listened to throughout the year, what’s really exciting is comparing your habits with those of friends. Spotify tapped into this interest by aggregating user histories, ranking each subscriber’s favorite song, album, and artist against the total volume of listeners. In other words, Wrapped doesn’t just tell you what music you like — it tells you whether you’re genuinely a musician’s biggest fan.
This approach gamified Spotify statistics and gave subscribers more reasons to share their summaries on social media. As a result, Wrapped became even more visible during its crucial launch window. For a brief moment in early December, everyone was discussing their favorite songs while getting a chance to learn about albums they missed. It was fun and improved Spotify’s bottom line by driving more engagement with its immense library — to say nothing of its subscription plans.
Of course, not all coverage surrounding Spotify Wrapped was positive. Even news stories with otherwise glowing responses noted the privacy concern of analyzing subscriber data so closely, especially after Spotify’s Facebook integration feature launched last April. This reaction is less to do with Wrapped itself than a privacy-focused climate, but anyone hoping to replicate Spotify’s success will need to make data security a priority.
At the end of the day, however, Spotify Wrapped shows us how powerful personalization can be. Instead of offering a dry end-of-year campaign, Spotify supercharged its brand visibility with an engaging holiday event for all subscribers. When your personalized marketing has room to inspire individuals and groups, you’ll find there’s room to create rich and meaningful experiences for them all.