The Untold Story Of Spotify Wrapped

As leftover turkey goes bad in the fridge and the calendar rolls into December, the next holiday tradition is the annual sharing of Spotify Wrapped. It's a magical time of year when everyone posts summaries of their music streaming habits to Instagram and other social media. Wrapped is the rare marketing coup for a big tech company, one in which people not only tolerate an oversaturated brand awareness campaign, but actively participate in it themselves. You might think you're letting friends know your musical taste when you share your top five songs to social media, but in fact you've just posted a free advertisement for the largest music streaming platform on the planet. The ability to get that kind of free branding from your customer base is powerful, and yearly recaps of user data have grown far beyond Spotify as other companies get in on the hype.

So, just how did Spotify Wrapped evolve into the cultural juggernaut that now proliferates across Instagram Stories each December? After all, you can access your Spotify data before Wrapped drops, just not on Spotify itself. The origin of these graphical data summaries starts almost ten years ago, but the key to their popularity came from a surprising source who never got credit or compensation. Here's the little known story of how Spotify Wrapped evolved from an ignorable email to a viral sensation that marks the start of the holiday season.

Spotify Wrapped first began in 2015, although back then it was called Year in Music. This was a separate website outside the app with basic information about a user's listening habits delivered by email, which included curated top of the year lists from Spotify editors and a variety of artists, in addition to the personalized selections. The next year, it was rebranded as Wrapped, and a playlist of the user's top songs was added. This was a great way to revisit the hits that defined their year, and created a miniature time capsule to which they could return.

In 2019, Wrapped was baked directly into the app itself in a bid to expose more users to the feature. That year, a crucial new capability was also added: the ability to share Wrapped insights to a user's social media. This was the shot in the arm Wrapped sorely needed, and it transformed the feature from a curiosity to a massively viral trend at the end of each year. Since then, the company has enhanced the virality of each year's data presentations by adding insights like 2021's Audio Aura, which ascribed personality traits to users based on listening habits, 2023's Sound Town, which assigned users to a global locale based on the national origin of their favorite artists and how closely aligned their listening habits with those around the world.

This year, Spotify added its oddest Wrapped feature yet: an AI podcast created by Google NotebookLM. It features two AI generated "podcast hosts" who discuss the user's listening habits in an uncanny valley conversation that mimics the rhythms of conversational podcasts. It has received a decidedly mixed response, with some users creeped out and others unimpressed.

Spotify Wrapped allegedly owes this success to someone who never made a penny from her contributions. Although Wrapped was innovated over a handful of years, it didn't become the yearly phenomenon we now know until it took on the format of an Instagram Story and added a share button to signal its social potential. Letting users broadcast aggregated annual data on their listening habits turned out to be a stroke of genius, transforming Wrapped from a private, somewhat boring data presentation into a cultural signifier of selfhood. People were so excited to announce their tastes to friends that they hardly cared if they were posting an advertisement for Spotify in the process  — if indeed they noticed that aspect in the first place.

That transformative idea, however, allegedly came courtesy of an unpaid intern. In 2020, the year Story sharing was added to Wrapped, artist Jewel Ham told Refinery29 that she pitched the idea to Spotify during a 2019 internship at the company. "It was received really well," she said of the pitch meeting. "They liked the idea. That was my last day." Users were instantly hooked when the sharing feature Ham had proposed was rolled out. In a newsroom post celebrating a decade of Wrapped, Spotify disclosed that, in 2023, Wrapped "engaged a record 227 million monthly active users."

For its part, Spotify scoffed at the idea that Ham deserves credit for Wrapped, telling Refinery29 in part, "While ideas generated during Spotify's internship program have on occasion informed campaigns and products, based on our internal review, that is not the case here with Spotify Wrapped. It's unfortunate that things have been characterised otherwise."

At this point, Spotify is aware of the cultural capital Wrapped has accrued, taking a careful approach to curation. After all, what they share to users will be shared on potentially hundreds of millions of social media accounts. Spotify therefore takes a plethora of data points into account, including song listens and skips, user playlists, and overall engagement.

It's rather telling that, in an interview with its Head of Global Music Curation and Discovery and Senior Director of Personalization regarding the company's approach to designing Wrapped, Spotify execs didn't talk much about Wrapped itself at all. Instead, the executives focused on how they curate music and push people toward certain songs or artists over the course of a year. The goal is seemingly not to provide users with an accurate summary of their listening habits, nor to fabricate them, but to subtly guide those habits over the course of a year, leaving users pleased with their Wrapped results and creating overlap between many users who then feel like part of a cultural moment.

The aforementioned interview uses the example of Charli XCX's "BRAT." Spotify was given early access to the hugely influential album (likely thanks to deals between Spotify and Charli's label, Warner Music). It was then able to target the album to different listening demographics, helping to seed it into the zeitgeist through influential playlists and other "editorial surfaces." The result of this? A large number of users ended up with "BRAT" tracks on their 2024 Wrapped, and her likeness was used in its promotional materials. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, the year's inevitable top artist, has Easter eggs scattered across the platform, as she's known for leaving her fans a trail of breadcrumbs.

In response to the extreme virality of Spotify Wrapped as an annual marketing campaign, myriad other companies have hopped on the bandwagon over the past several years, creating Wrapped-esque campaigns. Of course, the other DSPs got in on the hype, with Apple Music Replay, SoundCloud Playback, and Amazon joining the fray in 2024 with Amazon Music Delivered. But the trend hasn't been limited to music streamers. Reddit's Recap campaign takes users of the popular forum hosting site through their most popular posts and comments, while gamers have been able to get a yearly recap from Xbox, Playstation, or Steam at one time or another.

Yet things haven't stopped there. Companies you'd never expect continue to attempt a replication of Spotify Wrapped's success. Duolingo offers a look back at your language learning journey, giving that aggressively educational owl another way to shame you for failing to do your French conjugations. Even Equinox, a chain of lavishly upscale gyms in metropolitan areas, released a Wrapped-style product this year, informing members of their fitness achievements. The most amusing copycat came from grocery chain Aldi, which released recaps with insight into the most purchased items and categories of goods. But strangest of all might be Tinder's Year in Swipe Vison Board, which sounds like a way to relive the worst first dates you've been on but is thankfully a manifestation-style moodboard to set dating intentions for the year to come.

Still, none of these campaigns have enjoyed anything close to the level of success Spotify Wrapped continues to each year. Its unique virality is a phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing.