Spotify Wrapped

Anna Aardal, Kate Lawrence, Ray Rolfe

COM-361
Jeyoung Oh
November 20, 2023
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Introduction
Spotify is one of the leading music streaming service providers in the world. We chose to
examine how the Spotify Wrapped PR campaign has influenced the way the world views
listening to music, the impacts it has made, and the success that it has brought to the company.

Background
On April 23, 2006, the music streaming platform Spotify was created, a year after Pandora was
created and a year before Amazon Music was created. Spotify offers both free and
paid(premium) services. With the free service, users can listen to any music they would like to
but there are ads in between songs and users have a limited amount of skips. With Spotify
Premium, users have the chance to listen to music without ads and can create and customize their
playlists. If a user has Spotify Premium, their Wrapped results tend to be more accurate than the
results of the users that have the free service. In 2015, Spotify started to test a user-interactive
“end-of-the-year” feature that would show users their listening habits and they called it “Year in
Music.” In 2016, Spotify officially launched Spotify Wrapped as a way to stand out from its
competitors. Spotify Wrapped typically tracks users' listening data from January to October and
creates a customized playlist that is sent to users towards the beginning of December.

Research
PR practitioners believe that the Spotify Wrapped campaign is very successful. It seems to be
very successful since the campaign runs every year and causes an increase in Spotify users. The
campaign is successful largely due to the amount of user interaction and user promotion. One
practitioner who was talking about the campaign stated “Creating personalized content that your
audience wants to share is a winning strategy”(Sprout Social).

Target Publics
Spotify has two target publics for their campaign. The primary target public is current Spotify
users. Spotify wants its current users to feel as though they are very important to the brand by
giving back to them and showing them that all of the time they spent listening to Spotify did not
go unnoticed. The secondary target public is non-Spotify users/ users of other music streaming
services. By allowing current users to share the results of their Spotify Wrapped, it can compel
non-Spotify users to join so that they too can have a customized Wrapped to share with their
friends and family. It also gets people to want to be part of the Wrapped conversation so that they
do not feel like they are missing out.

Goals & Objectives

One of the main goals of the Spotify Wrapped campaign is to promote the brand through user
interaction, which is an awareness goal. Since Spotify Wrapped allows users to easily share their
results on their social media platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, users are able to
promote the brand among their friends. An objective of the campaign is to influence Spotify
users who have the free service to upgrade their account to the premium service in order for them
to get more accurate Wrapped results. As mentioned earlier in the report, when Spotify users
have the free service, they are more limited in how they interact with the music that they are
listening to.
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Key Messages
One of the key messages of the Spotify Wrapped campaign is “No matter what your listening
habits were, Spotify was with you during the year.” What this means is that every moment that
you made while listening to music was made with Spotify. Whatever occasion, Spotify is there to
provide you with the music that you love.

Strategies
One of the main strategies used by Spotify Wrapped is formatting each user’s Wrapped report as
a “story” similar to what is used on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat.
From each page of the Wrapped report, there is an option to directly “share” that page to a social
media platform. This encourages users to share their results on their social media pages to
promote the campaign and compare results with their friends and followers.

Tactics & Channels

On the day that Spotify Wrapped is released each year, Spotify sends their current users an
in-app notification with a link to where they can view their results. Similar notifications are also
sent to current users’ email addresses. Spotify also promotes the campaign on their official social
media pages leading up to the release of Wrapped each year, and on the day that it is released.

In certain major cities, Spotify purchases billboard advertisements promoting their campaign.
This appeals to non-Spotify users in those cities who would not be receiving notifications
directly from Spotify.

Evaluation
The Spotify Wrapped
campaign is believed to
have been successful in
getting Spotify to become
the clear leader in music
streaming services. As
illustrated in the chart on
the left from Business of
Apps, since Wrapped was
launched, the number of
Spotify users has increased
at a more rapid pace when
compared to competitors in
the music streaming
service. Between 2016 and
2022 Spotify gained 152
million users. During that
same timeframe, Apple
Music gained 68 million users, Amazon Music gained 66 million users, and YouTube Music
gained 77 million users. Market demand caused a dramatic increase for all services involved, but
Spotify remains the leading service provider partly because of the success of the Wrapped
campaign.
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Executive Summary
We chose to examine how the Spotify Wrapped PR campaign has influenced the way the world
views listening to music, the impact that it has made, and the success that it has brought to the
company. Spotify Wrapped was officially launched in 2016 as a way for Spotify to stand out
from its competitors as well as allow users to see their listening habits throughout the year.
Spotify Wrapped is seen by practitioners as a successful campaign since it largely uses user data
and user promotion for its campaign. Spotify Wrapped can be easily shared amongst social
media platforms which allows users to share with their friends and can influence non-Spotify
users to join the platform so that they do not feel like they are missing out. Since Spotify
Wrapped launched in 2016, the amount of premium users has steadily increased every year.
Spotify continues to remain the top music streaming service, largely due to Spotify Wrapped.
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Works Cited

Curry, David. “Music Streaming App Revenue and Usage Statistics (2023).” Business of Apps,
20 July 2023, www.businessofapps.com/data/music-streaming-market/.

Ferrer, Joseph. “The Secret Recipe behind Spotify’s Success.” UX Design, 8 Dec. 2022,
uxdesign.cc/the-secret-recipe-behind-spotifys-success-f78f8eda68ee.

Verheijen, Jim. “Case Study: How Does Social Data-Driven Content Influence User
Engagement?” Bootcamp, 3 Feb. 2023,
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/social-data-driven-features-a-case-study-on-the-fictional-pathfinde
r-app-49414ddb8d2c.

Woods, Katie. “Spotify Wrapped: What Marketers Can Learn from the Viral Campaign.” Sprout
Social, 1 Nov. 2023, sproutsocial.com/insights/spotify-wrapped/.