That’s a wrap: how Spotify Wrapped taps into the power of personalization
Lots of things occur to mark the beginning of the holiday season, Starbucks releases their new slew of seasonal cups, the Jingle Ball is held, and social media becomes obsessed with reflecting on the year that’s passed. Whether its multi-post instagram stories or a new song release about how this year has affected them, individuals across the world take to social media to publicly express how they feel about another year gone by.
This year, one company in particular tapped into the power of personalization to address the year end human need for reflection, Spotify. Personalized features are not new to users, we’ve seen it with Starbuck’s frequently ordered feature, Google Chrome’s customized search options, and more. However, Spotify Wrapped executes personalization with a certain flare that is often lacking in today’s industry.
Let’s take a closer look at how they did it.
1. Spotify Wrapped helps you introspect.
Music is a core aspect to most people’s everyday lives and past memories. Through creating a journey for users that includes snapshots of their overall music tastes, preferences, and habits, Spotify has created the music equivalent of a photo album. After looking at our Spotify Wrapped, we’re left with the same feeling that we might have after looking through a horde of embarrassing elementary school or prom pictures, nostalgia. By designing the Wrapped feature to incorporate arrows and slide animations, the user very much gets the sense that they’re flipping through the years. Particularly effective in the journey of introspection is a screen that displays top artists and songs for each year in the decade. This feature evokes distant memories about songs and artists from our past, taking us back to specific places and times — much like how a picture might jog someone’s memory of a trip they’d taken a while back. Spotify Wrapped successfully helps users look inwards by reminding them of what they know about themselves through music, whether it’s highlighting their favorite boy band from when they were a teenager or the song that helped them get through their last break up.
2. Spotify Wrapped helps you discover.
Not only does Spotify do a great job of reminding you of the things you do know about yourself, it points out some fun facts you might not even be aware of. By condensing all your listening data, it provides you with cool insights into how much time you’ve spent on Spotify over the years, the number of countries you’ve listened to artists from, and the artist you seemed to have connected with the most in recent days. Any journey of reflection has a very clear “a-ha” moment where you realize something about yourself that you hadn’t thought of before. As you look at a global map that points out specific countries you’ve been able to reach through the music you listen to, it dawns on you how interconnected your music taste really is. From looking at a visual graphic that highlights minutes you spent listening on Spotify per year, it becomes evident how your personal use of Spotify has changed over the years. Through these sorts of features, Spotify Wrapped beautifully builds in the “a-ha” moment for its users.
3. Spotify Wrapped helps you connect.
Through providing ways to share your recent journey of reflection, Spotify enables you to subscribe to a larger musical community. Within minutes of posting my own top artist of the decade I had dozens of responses in my inbox. Everyone around me had gone through the same journey and to my surprise, a lot of us had similar experiences over which we connected. After the ten or so minutes spent reflecting on my own experience with music, Spotify enabled me to share what I had found and use those findings to connect with the people around me. Using fun infographics, a flirty color scheme, and by incorporating the ability to share to social media, Spotify actually provided an incentive to share fun musical facts. Sharing became a social activity as opposed to a chore.
4. Spotify Wrapped embodies the spirit of the Holidays
Interestingly enough, the feature pulls off such personalization without seeming like it’s doing so at the expense of the user. Typically, users are skeptical of applications that use their data to tell them things about themselves. If you see a commercial on your Facebook feed for a site you recently visited, your reaction is more along the lines of “that’s so creepy”, not “this is so cute”. However, users around the world embraced Spotify Wrapped and the whole phenomena prompted the application to be downloaded 2.3 million times over the course of three days, according to data from Sensor Tower, which tracks mobile downloads and revenue. Spotify had on average been downloaded 1.9 million times during the same 3-day period in the previous three weeks meaning that after the release of Spotify Wrapped the number of downloads increased by 23%. In fact, Spotify’s number of positive reviews per day on December 5th, the day Spotify Wrapped was released, was 1,334 which is the highest it has been at any point in the last 3 months.
Why did users respond so well to a feature that takes advantage of data that has been collected about them? Because it embraces the spirit of the holidays. The feature uses a Christmas themed color palette, a photo album like ambience, and fun infographics, all of which help the overall design align more with the holiday spirit than the aura of a big data company. More importantly, Spotify Wrapped integrated the three core functionalities of introspection, discovery, and community, and in doing so successfully pulled off one of the best implementations of a personalized feature.
