Why Spotify Wrapped is Still Relevant

Yes, I'm going to share my top song.

Happy Spotify Wrapped Day to all who celebrate. The app, which sends out personalized yearly recap each December, revealed the experience this morning.

Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl is my top song — in the top 0.05% of listeners, no less. Like most everyone else, Taylor Swift is my top artist, .

Do you care? Probably not.

Do I? Why, yes I do, because I can’t imagine writing about Spotify Wrapped without telling you about my Spotify Wrapped. In fact, I tabled everything else I was planning to send today to write about this inescapable piece of marketing material.

Spotify Wrapped reminds me of Buzzfeed quizzes and hashtags, in that they’re hangers-on of millennial cringe, the home where I now pay rent (because millennials can’t afford housing, as we all know). While many of these foundational pieces of content marketing feel passe, Spotify Wrapped each year still floods our feeds. Why? I have a few hypotheses:

It’s tied to the product. I will live by this philosophy: the best marketing campaigns and content experiences are ultimately tied to the product they represent. Here, music drives the experience in a hyper-personal way. There is no doubt that music and Spotify music player is at the center of this content. Arguably, Wrapped’s weakest points are when get away from their product, such as assigning made-up music categories, or last year’s geographic identifier.

The UI, graphics and design. It’s beautifully done, fun, colorful. Critically, it’s easy to share. There are multiple visual options to choose from when sharing with others. I think they nail this every year in a way that feels right for the brand and easy for the customer.

We don’t care about privacy (or whatever) when it’s wrapped in a bow. One of my friends posted a screenshot of their top artists and said, “Honestly, such a great representation of me.” Well … yes. That’s literally what it’s telling you. In fact, I’m laughing out loud writing this because it’s so obvious. Yet, I get it. It doesn’t feel that obvious when we’re in the experience.

We forget that every moment we open the app (and sometimes even when we don’t), we’ve agreed to let it collect our data. Which, fine. I love this content experience as much as everyone. But the learning for brands here is that if you’re going to be collecting customer’s information, you better be thinking through what that user interaction is like. It needs to comes across as helpful (song suggestions, say) instead of shadowy or nefarious. It’s a tightrope to walk, and not just on Wrapped Day.

People still just want to talk about themselves. Tale as old as time - or, at least, social media. One of my first big lessons in managing social at the beginning of it’s era (a lifetime ago) was you’re more successful as a brand if you adopt the old party trick and give people the opportunity to talk about themselves. Audience data gives Spotify the perfect opportunity to do so. It’s almost like a mini-therapy session where you can’t understand your actions or emotions until it’s reflected back to you. And then you can’t get enough and want to share it with the world. It prompts validation. It makes you say obvious things like, “Honestly, such a great representation of me.” It makes you write a Substack where you sneak in your stats, such as a total of 25,610 listening minutes.

It’s not much different than posting clever away messages on AIM, or putting a bumper sticker on your car or notebook, or anything else that signals TASTE and IDENTITY in whatever current era. This will continue to be a human truth in the future, which -

It feels personal and safe in the age of AI. I was expecting a message along the lines of “our AI tells us …” since those two letters are slapped on everything these days. (And, I do listen use their “AI DJ X” frequently.) But it was noticeably absent in the Wrapped experience. This must be intentional. I think it signals that these brands aren’t quite ready to talk about the use of AI in a massive, broad-stroke way across customer bases - particularly in content that will be widely shared by those customers, out of the direct control of the brand. GenAI still makes people nervous. We’re comfortable with you taking our data and presenting it back to us with Taylor Swift’s video message; but a personalized message from an AI Taylor Swift, or GenAI songs meant to sound like our top 5, or hyper-personalized genre categories that are created in realtime feels too dangerous in 2024. Tech hangups, ethical questions, and more drive that, and rightfully so.

Will we get there? Maybe. But not for a bit. That said, they do have an “AI Podcast Recap” I found after clicking around a bit. So, the messaging is there, if not front-and-center. The podcast experience is a little weird, which is why I think it’s somewhat buried. (It did tell me that I’m actually in the 0.03% of top listeners of Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, so I guess I did find some value in it?) I’ll bet Spotify is looking to see what the interaction is before leaning into the idea of AI created content more fully. I think it was smart of Spotify to message this in the way they did: they have a good formula going, so no need to rock the boat for a trend when they have one they’ve already started.

What are your thoughts here? Is this still a good brand move? And most critically, what was your top song? Leave it in the comments.