With this year coming to an end, many have a lot of different events and things to look forward to, whether that be Christmas, Thanksgiving or even New Years. There are also people who await the return of “Spotify Wrapped”.
For those that are unaware of what Spotify wrapped is, it is an update made by Spotify that sums up the users year by collecting their data to show their most streamed songs.
As the simple idea of getting an overview on the different musical phases you’ve went through throughout the year may be fun, it also may slightly make certain people feel uneasy knowing Spotify collects user’s data for their advantage, but newsflash: literally every site, app or social media platform does the same thing. The collected data is analysed to create or recommend personalised playlists based on what you could possibly like. For those worried: the data collected isn’t as serious as some may imagine it to be (or at least the data that we know for sure Spotify uses). It consists of the basics, such as the user’s birth date, email address, country, postal code, gender and voice data.
Regarding the update itself, Spotify has the ability to rank you as a certain percentage of a listener of a specific artist. For example, many easily end up as top 2% listeners of their favourite artists in their own country. (Congrats if that’s you). A newer addition to Spotify Wrapped would be the personality types. Now, Spotify also shows the listener what his personality type is. That could be either the adventurer, the replacer, the specialist or many others. All the types are based off of the listening traits of the user.
Spotify also calculates the minutes a person has spent on listening to music in general, which isn’t necessarily accurate. There is a possibility that a part of your offline streams may not be precisely added up, however, the result should still be pretty close to, if not precise. That however is one thing. The other problem with Spotify wrapped is the way they calculate the users “favourite” or “most listened to songs”. As Spotify calculates the results based off of the play count, it uses the song that the user has most likely either played a few times during January, while going through their unusual musical phase , ironically, or generally once but it somehow ended up as their “most listened song”. That leads to a few users being generally disappointed with their results.
Marketing-wise, Spotify uses social-media advertising that they don’t even have to pay for as their users advertise it for them. Spotify allows their users to share their summaries onto nearly all social media platforms which usually creates a week-lasting trend of everyone spamming their insta stories with their top listened songs and artists. This creates a short, yet quite a popular trend that spreads all around the world. It also gives a major advantage to Spotify against its’ competitors, like for example, Apple Music. Many IOS users still prefer to use Spotify over Apple Music, hence why there is over 116 million Spotify users and around 88 million Apple Music users.
As Apple did not have their own “wrapped” for quite some time, and only recently (2022) did they create their “Apple Music Replay”. Sadly, you cannot access it through the app, but a browser, making it not as simple for the users to check their own summary of the year. Since Apple Music Replay is still new, it’s not as successful as Spotify and the word-of-mouth has not spread much in their case. However, there is still a chance, and for all we know, it can also become as popular as Spotify Wrapped in the foreseeable future.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-music-vs-spotify/
https://www.deseret.com/entertainment/2022/11/30/23486540/can-apple-music-replay-compete-with-spotify-wrapped
https://www.popbuzz.com/music/news/spotify-wrapped-accurate-tracking-when/
-https://privacy.commonsense.org/privacy-report/spotify-music
Definitely one of Spotify’s most visible advantages over the competition in the music streaming industry. Apart from a great marketing, it can also be appreciated by long term users. As a customer since 2016 myself. It’s certainly a nice feature to be able to take a journey into what I listened to each year.
It is great to have such an amazing feature as Spotify Wrapped, which I look forward to seeing every year as a Spotify user. However, I would improve the method of selecting favourite song, so it would be calculated not only based on play count, but also on the frequency of listening throughout the whole year.
Wow, that’s amazing! Spotify is truly innovative and outstanding in the market where it attracts new customers with unusual marketing. I agree there should a better algorithm for most played songs as it is not accurate in the year. On the other hand, we shouldn’t underestimate the data collection by the firm and look close what they are doing with our data.
I have to say, as an Apple Music user, I do feel slightly jealous. Though yes, it’s a bit annoying after a while when I see all my friends posting their screenshots (especially if they have bad music taste) on their social media, but I myself would like a wrapped conclusion of my music phases throughout the year. I also like how fun Spotify makes it each time.