Spotify Wrapped: Our Favorite End of the Year Tradition
Written by Alexia Soriano
This week we’ve been holding space for finals while silently judging our Instagram feed’s Spotify Wrapped story posts. As #SpotifyWrapped takes over social media as an end-of-the-year ritual, the promotion sits at the cool kids’ table as a first of its kind. Since its launch in 2016, Spotify Wrapped has become a cultural milestone, blending music and nostalgia into an annual tradition. Each year, it feels like a personalized award show, celebrating the artists we cherished and keeping millions eagerly awaiting their exclusive invitation to relive their soundtrack of the year.
Music gives people a sense of self—an aesthetic to latch onto. Even the platforms we choose to stream speak volumes to who we are as people. Spotify is the #1 music streaming app in the world with 150 million subscribers, widely known for its beloved end-of-the-year campaign, Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped is a personalized summary of users’ listening habits over the past year, highlighting most-streamed songs, artists, genres, podcasts and even total minutes listened, all presented in an engaging, shareable format. Whether you only listen to music while studying or have a different playlist for each part of your day, Spotify Wrapped curates a detailed analysis of your musical identity.
The success of the Spotify Wrapped campaign during the holiday season lies in its ability to combine personalization with a sense of online community. Embracing the spirit of giving, Spotify offers its users a gift: a playful, data-driven recap of their year in music. By turning subscriber data into an engaging and easily shareable experience, Spotify shifts the spotlight from the app to its listeners, encouraging them to showcase their streaming habits across platforms—a brilliant strategy that amplifies the brand through user-generated content.
The use of data analytics has revolutionized marketing campaigns like Spotify Wrapped where there is an emphasis on personalizing the user experience. Spotify collects behavioral data and digital analytics to curate playlists and yearly reports for users, using platforms Apache Hadoop and Apache Kafka to manage the large amounts of data collected daily. What makes the campaign so unique is its shareability with other social platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat.
As the year comes to a close, the music you’ve listened to has shaped a nostalgic report of who you’ve been in the past 12 months. Through heartbreak, nights out, cramming for finals, or special celebrations, music is a constant companion, and Spotify summarizes your year’s journey through music.
In the last 48 hours, Instagram stories have been taken over by Spotify Wrapped, signaling to our social cliques who to allow on aux in the car and who to avoid. Whether your top artist was Taylor Swift, The Weekend, Bad Bunny or that super niche artist no one would know (we get it, you're different), it seems that everyone wants to let the people in their lives know who they’ve been listening to. With 60 million shares of Spotify Wrapped across social media platforms in 2021, the app has branded its campaign as an end-of-the-year tradition in which people declare their identity.
Spotify Wrapped is an original campaign among its competitors, but it inspired others to take on similar end-of-the-year traditions. Apple Music was quick to put their own twist on yearly music reports in 2019 when they installed a similar app feature. The streaming service has app-generated playlists ranking the top songs each user played throughout the year, called Apple Music Replay. YouTube released their version, Music Recap, in 2022 with personalized playlists and fun infographics that are eye-catchers for subscribers.
Despite the competition's attempts to deliver quality features, it has proven tough to beat Spotify’s impressive use of statistical data that matches users with a yearly musical profile. With 37% market share of music streaming, Spotify uses its earned media to popularize the app, create a community for its streamers and execute a cross-platform amplification of its brand. Apple Music and YouTube Music have taken inspiration from Spotify, but the winner of the battle of the best music wrapped reports is undoubtedly Spotify.
Modern marketing in the digital age will continue to change the way we see ourselves in relation to our online world. Spotify Wrapped is among the first to successfully deliver personalized digital marketing features, which helped brand the app as an essential for connectedness. Whether you were a 'Vampire' or a 'Luminary' this year, Spotify Wrapped united us all through the soundscape of 2024.