039: Spotify Wrapped Campaign Is Viral Perfection

Welcome to Will It Stick? podcast, where hosts Melissa and Alexis cover creative advertising campaigns, PR stunts, and marketing activations that brands of all shapes and sizes pull, and dive into the research and data to understand if it worked.

Today we are talking about Spotify and how its Wrapped Campaign is an enormous success and a reminder to brands at just how valuable personalized marketing can be.

Spotify revolutionized how people listen to music.

Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006 by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon but it didn’t launch until two years later in 2008. Elk knew that he’d never be able to legislate away from piracy. He had to legally find a way to create a service that was better than piracy and that also compensated the music industry. That concept became Spotify. So, through Spotify, we are essentially renting songs as opposed to owning them.

For $4.99 to $15.99 a month (or for free with ads), users can access a catalog of over 70 million different songs and a wide range of specially curated playlists, podcasts, and shows.

Today, Spotify is not only the biggest music streaming service worldwide in 2021, with a growing library of over 70 million songs, but it is also the world’s most popular AUDIO streaming service….. So that means podcasts too, with over 3.2 million podcasts available. All those songs and podcasts are available for FREE to users who don’t mind listening to commercials. Today, Spotify has 381 million users, including 172 million subscribers across 184 markets, and is valued at $54 BILLION. Hands down, Spotify has transformed music listening,

This valuation is impressive but what’s even more impressive is Spotify’s monthly active user growth. In 2015, Spotify had 68 million monthly active users and in 2021, they have more than 380 million.

Spotify originally released their first iteration of Wrapped in 2015 as “Year in Music,” a personalized marketing experience for users to look back through their last 365 days via the songs and artists they listened to most. Spotify Wrapped has now become an annual tradition, served to subscribers every December since. Spotify Wrapped includes the five musicians a user has listened to most often, the songs to which they have listened most, and their favorite music genres. It also includes information about activity on the Spotify platform as a whole, fun and random stats that create super sharable moments and make users feel like the inhuman platform GETS THEM better than even their BFF.

While Spotify Wrapped is commonly referred to as an annual collection of data, it actually really only pulls data from January 1 and October 31 of a given year is included.

This concept is BRILLIANT in my humble opinion – because it’s totally PERSONAL. Spotify Wrapped is one of the best examples of personalized marketing in the past decade.

So the first year Spotify launched the Wrapped campaign, it didn’t go viral. It included stats about most played songs and how many hours you listened, but nothing about it made it really all that shareable. Then in 2017, Spotify amped it up and released user’s Wrapped campaigns along with customizable, fun graphics and a little more flair. This made users WANT to brag about their musical moments throughout the year, and they started sharing them on social media.

This kind of personalized marketing most definitely increases brand loyalty and in this case, it also builds major brand awareness. Those users who started sharing their wrapped campaigns in 2017 reached their friends who maybe weren’t using Spotify yet (I was stuck on Pandora for way too long before switching over). This somewhat simple campaign made up of a complication of user data allows Spotify to show users how the company has been able to provide a valuable streaming experience. Users feel more connected, this company KNOWS them and chances are higher they will keep on subscribing.