The Spotify Wrapped model: Why companies are copying it and failing miserably
Spotify has seen massive success using customer data to create an annual viral sensation. Some companies could learn a thing or two from Wrapped, but others should steer far, far away.
If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ve seen Spotify Wrapped. Every first of December, millions of music streamers flock to the Spotify app to see their personalized music year-in-review like kids on Christmas morning.
The idea is simple, yet genius. Every year, Spotify collects (seemingly) a metric ton of user data surrounding listening preferences — songs, artists, genres, repeated plays, etc. — and then pumps out a digestible, Snapchat-story-like mobile experience for its 456 million users breaking down each individual’s listening trends from the past year. In addition to the basics — your top five artists, most played songs, and minutes of listening, to name a few — every year, Spotify adds some new unique insights. This year, users saw their “listening personality” — an MBTI-style breakdown of each user’s listening habits (I’m an Early Adopter, or ENVC, by the way).
As a result, Spotify gets a full day or two of free social media marketing almost entirely driven by its users. The whole event is incredibly interactive, from users tapping through their personalized insights to sharing curated summaries on any and every social media platform to scrolling countless friends’ posts. This engagement creates a feeling of pride and self-expression, further leading to brand loyalty to Spotify. Rinse and repeat next December.
The Wrapped model has gotten so popular that many companies in the tech space are starting to copy it. Despite this, it’s clear that Spotify Wrapped continues to be the most successful at these year-end, data-driven wrap-ups. Case in point: Apple Music Replay, Apple’s competing year-end wrap-up, is nowhere near as successful, despite offering a similar product. And it’s easy to see that there is no other corporation-backed annual trend that breaks the internet like this year after year after year. What other company has young people talking about them — for free, even — every single year?
So what makes Spotify so good at this? Which companies missed the mark? What’s the formula for a successful, data-driven guerilla marketing campaign like Spotify Wrapped? And which companies could possibly implement Wrapped with huge success rivaling Spotify?
Companies have failed to replicate the success of Spotify Wrapped.
From what I’ve seen, the reason that a lot of these year-end wrap-ups don’t work is that the insight they provide falls into one or more of these four categories: creepy, uninteresting, impersonal, or not shareable. Customers are typically already on-edge about how much data is being collected on them for advertising purposes. It’s not usually a great idea to remind users how much you know about them, especially if it feels like your firm knows more about the user than they do themself. Some cases to consider below:
Tinder
Some companies have half-baked the Wrapped model by releasing an all-encompassing overview of user trends rather than a personalized experience. Tinder’s Year in Swipe is one example.
This isn’t all that creepy: it’s not like Tinder is telling you personally how many people swiped left on you. But Year in Swipe fails to be interesting or engaging because it is impersonal. The report mainly revolves around top trending emojis, the most popular Spotify anthems (ironically), and top date activities.
But here’s a question.
Who cares?
The best reaction you might get out of a reader is a light chuckle. But this provides virtually no value to the end user. This comes off as nothing but a silly PR campaign that might get picked up by a few news sites.
And because it provides no personal insight, there is no reason why users would engage in posting Year in Swipe on their Instagram, eliminating any chance for the campaign to be scalable or go viral to the extent that Spotify Wrapped does.
There is a fine line between being creepy versus being insightful.
Sidebar: in researching Year in Swipe, I learned that some Tinder users have taken matters into their own hands. TikTok User @amberwavesofbrain made a video showcasing her “dating wrapped,” in which she detailed how many first dates she went on, how many of those led to second dates, what she did on said dates, and more. The hashtag #datingwrapped now has over 50 million views on TikTok. Obviously, Tinder shouldn’t do this themselves — that would surely be creepy — but it’s worth noting that some people do find their own dating history interesting (or those of strangers on the internet).
GrubHub
This year, GrubHub mimicked Spotify Wrapped with its 2022 Delivered campaign. You might already spot a fundamental problem: who wants to be reminded about how much money they wasted on food delivery over the past 12 months?
Okay, GrubHub doesn’t actually put a dollar value on your spending habits in Delivered. But, looking at my own 2022 Delivered, despite being personalized, it’s still not all that interesting.
The report had the basics that you might expect: my most ordered item (pad see ew) and my go-to spot (shoutout to Nud Pob Thai Cuisine in Boston). But GrubHub also told me that I ordered on 17 days this year and tried a whopping 4 different cuisines in 2022.
It became clear to me that Spotify’s insights feel so relevant because many users probably consume all of their music on Spotify. In contrast, users are not as brand loyal when it comes to food delivery. Personally, I use GrubHub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash interchangeably, usually depending on which specific restaurant I want to order from or whichever platform ends up having the cheapest price/best promotion at the time. As a result, these insights say a lot about my transactions on GrubHub, but say very little about my overall food consumption over the past year.
Bottom line: the insight is uninteresting, and therefore neither shareable nor scalable.
So why hasn’t Apple Music caught up?
Spotify’s main competitor already had an advantage over Tinder and GrubHub in that, going in, they already knew that personalized music data is interesting to customers. Apple Music users have felt left out of the Wrapped hype for years now, but in 2022, they finally got what they wanted. Sort of.
Naturally, as a Spotify user myself, I wanted to hear what those on the dark side had to say about Replay.
“I think there’s something about it every year when Spotify Wrapped comes out,” said Colbi Edmonds, an Apple Music user with over 40,000 minutes of play-time in 2022. “I’m embarrassed to post screenshots of my Apple Music replay in some sort of a public shaming effect.”
Ouch.
Edmonds was nice enough to show me her Replay via screen sharing. My first surprise was that, unlike Wrapped, Replay is not actually in the Apple Music app itself — it’s on your internet browser. Red flag number one.
I also noticed a lack of insights outside of the most basic ones that Spotify offers. While Spotify will tell you how you rank in time spent listening to your favorite artist compared to other users, Apple Music only tells you how many minutes you spent yourself. And while Spotify shows you how many times you listened to your most played song, Apple Music will only show you what your top track was.
Red flag number two.
But the nail in the coffin for Apple Music Replay is that it is not shareable. While Replay has most of the basic insights that users want, it lacks the sharing features that Spotify does so well.
Spotify has a summary page at the end of the Wrapped experience which puts all the most important insights — top 5 artists, top 5 songs, minutes listened, and top genre — all in one place. Plus, Spotify gives the user 12 different ways to share or save their summary (and any of the other insights individually), including WhatsApp, Instagram Story, Facebook feed, Twitter, Snapchat, iMessage, copying a link, or simply downloading the image.
Apple Music Replay simply does not have that. While you can tap the share icon and generate a PNG, the image is one-size-fits-all. Even worse, there’s no summary page. Who wants to post four or five separate screenshots on their story?
Making matters worse, Replay just lacks character. It lacks pizzazz. Just look at it. It’s a complete antithesis to the bright neon colors and stylized typefaces of Spotify Wrapped.
“The packaging, the graphics, the way that it’s streamlined on the app, I think is super effective,” said Edmonds, referring to her experience seeing friends’ Wrapped graphics on social media.
Sure, Replay matches the clean, brushed aesthetic of the Apple brand. But perhaps that is a fundamental issue: music is inherently artistic and expressive, and while the Apple brand has always served as a canvas for creativity, Spotify paints that canvas.
How to do Wrapped the right way.
It’s not like Spotify Wrapped was the first-ever marketing campaign to use user data: collecting and implementing user data is the bread and butter of marketing. But Wrapped is different. It is uniquely personal and capitalizes on the user experience, first and foremost. And for that reason, Spotify continues to be rewarded year after year with free publicity thanks to their loyal customers.
But while no single company has come even close to the success of Wrapped thus far, it doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, not every company should follow Spotify’s lead, but there’s a lot to learn here. It all comes down to following these steps:
1. Start with a large, brand-loyal user base.
The Wrapped model — at least the scalable campaign aspect — suffers from the existence of a chicken-and-egg problem: creating a viral marketing campaign driven by users is impossible without having the users in the first place.
But just having a large user base is not enough. Users should be brand-loyal to the firm. As we saw in GrubHub’s case, a lot of these user trend insights are meaningless if the user uses multiple platforms for the same purpose (there’s no way I only ate four different cuisines this year). I don’t have any golden ratio to offer, but I’d guess that the user should at least spend the majority of their time with that single purpose on your platform over others.
2. Have a brand that is tied to users’ personalities.
If your brand is not an integral part of customers’ self-expression, doing a wrap-up campaign is unlikely to strike a chord with users.
We see soulless, out-of-touch advertising all of the time. There’s a reason why when we watch YouTube we skip the ads as soon as humanly possible. The challenge with a viral Wrapped campaign is that you don’t just need people to view your campaign — you also need them to engage with it themselves.
This is a tough ask. People hardly want to complete feedback surveys despite financial incentives like gift cards or coupons. The only way to make customers engage and spread the word is if they truly care.
“People feel a really deep connection to music,” Edmonds said, reflecting on the Wrapped model. “And I think that Spotify is able to package that in a way that’s really enticing to users.”
3. Collect a lot of data. Just don’t be creepy.
The line dividing meaningful insight and downright creepiness is incredibly narrow. Sure, customers are already aware that their every move is being tracked by every online service they use. It’s just unwise to remind them of this.
It’s important to handpick which insights invoke positive reactions. Avoid reminding customers how much money they spent on your service; it might cause them to spend less next year! And if the service is something consumers don’t find pride in consuming, don’t remind them of how much they do. Would you want to see a Marlboro Wrapped? You smoked 30 packs in March! Tough breakup?
A good rule is to avoid showing that your company knows more about the individual than the individual does about themself. It’s always unsettling to see when a recommendation algorithm shows you something you said out loud but never told the app. Spotify Wrapped treads lightly here: showing a user which artists they listened to the most usually shouldn’t be too surprising; therefore, it’s not creepy.
4. Build on this data collection with meaningful, personalized insights.
Again, the user must find some novelty in the facts given to them in their year-end wrap-up. That’s why it’s not enough to just give them raw numbers like minutes played, like what Apple Music does. Show the user what that means! Are they a top 1% Swiftie? The people want to know! Without seeing other users’ data, how is one to understand whether or not 30,000 minutes of listening is considered a little or a lot? Put these data into perspective and the intrigue will follow.
5. Fully engage the user in the wrap-up experience.
One of the key features of Spotify Wrapped is how interactive it is. You don’t just scroll through a nine-page report; instead, you tap through individual 15-second videos that slowly reveal each of the insights. Each page feels like there’s a drumroll happening as you eagerly await your results. Plus, the tactical feedback of tapping through pages creates the illusion that you are a part of it. It’s like you made your own Wrapped experience, not some huge team of data engineers in Stockholm.
So, for crying out loud, by any means necessary, do NOT just release some boring, corporate PDF summary of user trends if you have any intention of going viral. No one is going to read that, much less share it on their social media.
6. Make the wrap-up easy to share.
This last step is surprisingly crucial. Even if your Wrapped model is perfect in all of the other ways — insightful, engaging, not creepy, etc. — it’s nothing without the actual sharing done by users. So, make it as easy as possible. Add share buttons for everything. Make sure the aspect ratios are appropriate for the medium. Remove the friction points that might have a user wondering, should I really post that? Do I want that tied to my image? Give the user that extra push across the finish line!
Many companies can execute this model today.
So now it should be clear that Spotify Wrapped isn’t some magical one-off freak experiment that succeeded purely based on luck. Right place, right time? Sure. But there are so many companies that can execute this model immediately!
YouTube
Internet personality Hank Green provided a great idea on how to fix the infamous YouTube Rewind — an annual year-end wrap-up video that started as fun and lovable but became out-of-touch and corny until its ultimate demise in 2019.
Now, why was that? Green noted that making a wrap-up of the whole YouTube community used to be somewhat reasonable, but with the site’s exponential growth, the audience began to divide. “A YouTube video was moving away from being a genre of content and toward being a kind of content,” Green said in a video. “By 2018… [YouTube] was not a single community anymore, it was many communities. And many of those communities disliked each other.”
Green’s idea is to make a personalized version of Rewind that not only shows viewers their favorite creators, liked videos, and more, but also allows creators to interact with fans in their own Rewind (Spotify has similar features called Wrapped for Artists and Wrapped for Podcasters). The result is something YouTube users will actually care about and find insightful, rather than out-of-touch corporate nonsense.
Letterboxd
I’m surprised the social movie platform hasn’t done this already. Similar to YouTube, Letterboxd already has a Year in Review (here’s the one from 2021) that has been running since 2012, overviewing the highest-rated, most divisive, and most anticipated films of the year (among many other interesting stats). However, they have yet to release a personalized, curated Year in Review for individual users.
Many of the keys to Spotify’s success can apply to Letterboxd. Film lovers take pride in their viewing habits and can tie much of their personality to the movies they love (and hate). Users already share their watchlists on the platform itself.
With around 3 million users, the platform is sizable enough to see massive benefits in sharing on other social media. I personally became a Letterboxd user after seeing friends’ posts on Instagram and Twitter. Even inside Letterboxd itself, users could create a ton of engagement internally by posting and commenting on each others’ Year in Review posts.
Tesla
I chose Tesla specifically because Tesla drivers are notoriously loyal and many choose to brag — ahem, share knowledge — about their cars.
Since Tesla already has such an active online community, many drivers may find pride in showing off how many miles they drove, how much money they saved on gas by driving electric, or how many Superchargers they visited. And while a Tesla Year in Review might not generate significant conversion, it can definitely create stickiness for current users.
Delta Air Lines (or any other airline)
This is an interesting case, and honestly a bit of a stretch. But for loyal customers such as business travelers, it might be pretty cool to see how many destinations you flew to, how many miles you accumulated, or how many hours you spent in the air.
One major pain point exists here: this only works for loyal customers. If the passenger is not brand loyal and flies on multiple airlines throughout the year, this falls to the same issue with GrubHub: the data becomes uninsightful and incomplete. Additionally, if the passenger only flies once or twice per year, the results will look quite meager. There’s nothing wrong with only flying once in the past year, but it’s not exactly worth posting or bragging about.
So, perhaps only offer a year-end wrap-up to the highest-tiered frequent-flyer members. And, to create incentives for virality and posting, maybe offer some discounts or miles for those who post. No one’s gonna say no to that. Even then, though, I’m not sure the target demographic for frequent flyers is the same as young gen-z and millennial social media experts.
I’ll check back in a year. If any of these ideas end up landing, I expect a check in my name.
Other companies should avoid doing Wrapped altogether.
I hope it’s obvious now that Wrapped is not something that can just be carelessly thrown together. Before hopping onto the trend, think first about whether the brand inherently has what it takes to make an insightful year-end review in the first place.
The examples below were purely for my own entertainment, but there are so many other companies out there where Wrapped would make zero sense.
Vanguard/Fidelity/Charles Schwab/Robin Hood/Coinbase, etc.
At first glance, maybe a user might be interested to see how much money they earned in their investments over the past year.
However, this is not shareable. You might get the occasional clown who posts how much money they have, but those are few and far between (I hope).
On top of that, what if the user lost money that year? It is a horrible idea to remind people of how much money they lost. So do you only release a year in review for those in the green?
I’ll propose an alternative that might work for retail banking at a company like Chase or Bank of America: year-end budgeting insights. Sure, that’s not shareable or scalable. But this can provide incredible insight, build better spending habits, and create brand loyalty. Budgeting apps like Mint already exist, but integrating these budgeting insights direct-to-consumer could certainly be helpful.
TikTok
Why would YouTube Rewind work, but not TikTok Rewind (or, as I would call it, TokTik)? Simply put, users interact with YouTube very differently than how they interact with TikTok.
While a YouTube user will hand-pick which exact video they want to watch, usually pertaining to a channel they already subscribe to or have familiarity with, TikTok spoon-feeds short videos made by a huge assortment of accounts. On YouTube, you consciously decide your viewing experience; on TikTok, you’re just along for the ride.
As a result, any insight released in a year-end review would be… weird. It would feel like TikTok knows you better than you know yourself (which it does). If TikTok told me my favorite genre was cat videos, that wouldn’t be because I sought out cat videos myself. It’d be because they shoved cat videos down my throat.
Additionally, while YouTube users might find delight in seeing their liked videos or favorite creators, TikTok users may not feel the same sense of pride. I personally don’t want to know how many hours I wasted watching TikTok.
Google Search
There’s a reason why Google sticks to its overarching, general Year in Search every year: showing personal insight into Google searches would not just be creepy, it would downright enrage people. Users are already hyperaware of how much data Google collects about their online activity, and they don’t need to be reminded of it.
TL;DR
When executed well, the Wrapped model can be a massively successful marketing tactic that creates brand loyalty and awareness. But it’s not some one-size-fits-all configuration that any company can just cut and paste. It’s so easy to mess up: doing it wrong can make the brand look tone-deaf, creepy, or just plain stupid.
To see the same success that Spotify has achieved, brands must first consider whether or not their product is relevant to these personalized insights in the first place. They should also ponder how shareable these insights are — no sharing means no visibility, no scaling, and no virality.
And rather than dumping meaningless numbers on the user, tell them what it means! Bring perspective to the data to highlight its impact.
Last but not least, reduce friction points to sharing. What’s a viral marketing campaign without customers engaging in the first place? Make sharing these year-end reviews as simple as possible to cross that finish line.
Postscript.
Did I miss anything? Any features you’d want to see out of other companies that you interact with? I would love to hear from you.
And welcome to my Substack, by the way! I’m Justin Tang, a fourth-year undergraduate business student at Boston University. With this blog, I’m looking to combine my interests in the tech business world with my passion for writing and journalism. I hope you’ll stick around.
Happy New Year! See you soon.