I remember spending over 50,000 minutes listening to many different artists on Spotify in 2021, and comparing with friends to see our contrast in music taste. The excitement each year of getting our personalised Spotify Wrapped, is one of the many reasons why many people prefer Spotify over Apple music. So how has their most successful content marketing strategy come at no cost, and allowed Spotify to rise in the charts?
This campaign is user-driven, collecting data in order to present and interact with users in a creative way – from showing users their most played song to most listened genre. Spotify therefore brought back data as value to the user by personalising it.
Spotify was able to enhance user experience and make these slides easily shareable as insights are presented to users in many formats that have been optimised for different online platforms, as well as creating a visually pleasing format to post on social media.
Thus, with the encouragement for users to share on social media, this boosted their downloads by 21% in December 2020.
Through word-of-mouth communication online and discussion forums, this creates free advertising for Spotify as it spreads awareness among current and future users. In addition, many memes were created on social media, resulting in many people fearing on missing out, which prompted them to download Spotify.
By creating anticipation every December, Spotify has been able to create feelings of novelty and excitement for its users to receive their wrapped statistics. Millions therefore unknowingly promote Spotify for free when they post on social media, which demonstrates its importance for businesses to adopt content marketing that is valuable to their customers.
Are there any other reasons you can think of that contributed to Spotify’s Wrapped success?
The Digital Perspective 
I’m definitely guilty of falling victim to the ploy of Spotify wrapped and getting so excited for its release every year! I think another way that ‘wrapped’ helps market Spotify is that it encourages users to use the app even more! By users wanting to get in the top 3% of listeners for their favourite artist, or to get a higher number of ‘hours listened’ than their friends that year, they use the app way more than what they may have without the influence of sharing their Spotify wrapped.
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Yes for sure, I agree with you! Spotify Wrapped really was a successful campaign that helps user use the app a lot more to achieve those stats – I definitely am guilty of doing this too!
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Great post! I think their success also amounts to their aspect of differentiation. They are really the only platform that does a curated or personalised playlist with your most listened to songs. It generates excitement and the curiosity of wondering what songs you actually listened to the most throughout the year. I feel like without this, they would just be like the others (Apple Music and SoundCloud) which have very limited differentiation and uniqueness to them.
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Definitely agree with you – one of the many reasons why they are successful and grown in popularity! Spotify was able to differentiate themselves from their competitors and provide themselves with a competitive advantage with all these unique features.
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Like a lot of other users, I really enjoy and get excited to see my Spotify Wrapped every year, and love comparing the similarities and differences in artists and genres with my friends. I definitely think that the sense of personalisation and tailored presentation creates an engaging experience for the user, and also a sense of surprise and nostalgia to see what you’ve listened to over the year. Also, there’s almost a sense of community and belonging when Spotify Wrapped comes out, which you don’t see with Apple Music.
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Agree with you! Spotify Wrapped really helps bring users together to create that sense of community and talk about music they love. I also think personalisation is a key aspect to their success that separates them from their competitors. Spotify was able to understand their users and provide them with features they would love – and creating feelings like nostalgia like you said really keeps their users engaged.
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