See how Spotify changed the game with its #wrapped campaign

Spotify is a Swedish-American music streaming and media services provider founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is the biggest music streaming service provider with over 406 million monthly active users out of which 180 million are paying subscribers, as of December 2021.

In just a short period of time, it became one of the favorite music streamers of the world. But Apple Music were their greatest competition and to overcome the competition and showcase their offerings Spotify in early December 2016 launched a marketing campaign called Wrapped. The idea behind this campaign was to promote Spotify and in addition to encourage the user to share about it on social media. The campaign has developed its own unique features which are different from their rivals.

Spotify stated that “We were giving people an interesting way to talk about themselves”. Wrapped is a way of returning the favor to its users by discovering more of their music taste and the data can be helpful in rediscovering more music of their choice.

Spotify Wrapped became a viral marketing campaign for them. This includes all the songs that users have been listening to in the previous year, their favorite artist, the genre they were listening to the most, and along with the minutes it was streamed.

Every year millions of users share their Spotify #wrapped on their social media profiles. Spotify also sends an email to every user who is eligible for the year unwrapped. To most of the people, it was their favourite email of the year. People were attracted to this form of advertising because it was so personal.

Every year during the end of the season these Spotify-wrapped cards dominate Instagram stories, tweets, and Facebook posts. It is a win-win situation for both the service provider as well as the users.

Spotify wrapped in 2019 achieved almost 3 billion streams from the wrapped playlists. The campaign was so successful that it was mentioned in at least 1.2 million posts on Twitter.  As the campaign was introduced at the end of the year, Spotify saw a historical jump in the traffic generated.