Spotify Year-End "Wrapped" Campaign and The Success Model

Spotify Year-End "Wrapped" Campaign and The Success Model

Overview

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Since 2015, Spotify has provided its user with a Year-End “Wrapped” report that shows tops songs, albums, and genres of the year. Each year Spotify provides this free report to show how music fans engage with their streaming service. This has evolved to provide a personalized report for each user, offer metrics for artist and advertisers, and been expanded to over 21 markets (Swant 2019).

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Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that allows its users access to millions of songs and other content from artists all around the world. Basic functions such as playing music are free, but you can also choose to upgrade to Spotify Premium for a paid subscription service. Spotify is available across a range of devices, including computers, phones, and tablets (“what is Spotify”). Spotify has been viewed as one of the most popular streaming services in the world including music from the biggest artists of today to smaller indie artists (Symons 2018). As of October 2019, the company has 248 million monthly active users, including 113 million paying subscribers (Vogel 2019).

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This Spotify campaign became a viral hit and turned millions of people into unpaid Spotify “influencers” by sharing their report on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In the first week after Spotify “Wrapped” 2019 went live, more than 60 million users engaged with the in-app story experience that racked up nearly 3 billion streams of playlists from year-end collections. It has also been a massive hit on social media, which according to Twitter, has been mentioned in at least 1.2 million posts during the same period of time (Swant 2019).

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The SUCCESs Model

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To analyze the Spotify campaign, I used the SUCCESs Model provided by authors Chip and Dan Heath in their book “Made to Stick”. In the book, the authors talked about the six principles of “sticky” ideas that help create successful marketing and communication campaigns like the Spotify’s Year-End “Wrapped” reports. The first principle, Simplicity. A short and simple statement so thoughtful that it serves as a master plan for the basis of your campaign. The second principle, Unexpectedness. Executing an idea in a way that captures the people’s attention and has the ability to hold on to that attention. The third principle, Concreteness. Making a campaign that is memorable, easy to understand, and aimed for a specific audience. The fourth principle, Credibility. This is where you make your idea or plan reliable, factual, and accepted to the consumer, audience, or participant. The fifth principle, Emotional. How do you get people to care about your idea and want to protect, preserve, or promote it? The sixth and last principle, Stories. After the campaign is released, in what way do people become an active audience and begin to respond to your core message (Heath, 2008). I see all six of these principles reflected in the successful Spotify campaign because it became a global phenomenon that was used by millions of people.

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Simple

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The Spotify Year-End Campaign core idea is simple, provide users with a report that they can use to relive their year of music. Spotify pulled the data and metrics from its users of what they listen to from January 1st thru October 31st and consolidated that information. Making this available online allows users to then share it across social media platforms and create an experience for others to see and comment upon. Spotify does have some criteria such as needing to have listened to at least 5 different artists, 30 different tracks, and 60 minutes of music before October 31st. For the most part, however, it is simple for a user to participate and for the company to provide (“Your 2018 Wrapped”).

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Unexpected

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The Spotify Year-End Campaign itself continues to capture our attention because each year it provides a new way to use these reports. When it started in 2015, Sportify provided a report to show how music fans engaged with their streaming service. It evolved in 2016 to include personalized year-end playlists and was rebranded officially to “Wrapped”. In 2017, “Wrapped” expanded from users to now involve artists and advertisers in which it provides them with metrics on the past year that they can then share and use to their advantage. Last year, in 2018, Wrapped reports debuted in 18 markets, which then expanded to 21 markets in 2019 along with it being built into the Spotify app. Also, in 2018, Outdoor advertising played a key role in the Wrapped campaign. Spotify had 5,100 unique billboards running globally that included data from their users and artist (Swant, 2019). The market before the Spotify campaign had only Apple’s iTunes play count of the song’s users listened to and Spotify providing stream amount of songs at the time. Like Dan Heath said in the YouTube video, “Made to Stick: Voodoo Doughnut—Getting Noticed in a Crowded Market”, Spotify used this idea to disrupt the pattern and stand out to all other streaming services which is why it became so popular (Heath 2010). Spotify’s chief rival Apple Music launched its own multi-year retrospective, with “Replay” in 2019. Replay is a personalized playlist of your top songs by year. Replay is very much like Wrapped, except that it includes playlists for every year you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, retroactively (Perez, 2019).

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Concrete

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For this campaign, Spotify did not essentially have to do much besides pull data for its users. The need for promoting this service, was done by the user. Making something that is personal to each user allowed them to share their interest in music with their followers. Spotify Premium subscribers receive access to more personalized data stories and insights, including things like the numbers of artists discovered and the top artist they discovered. Besides being a fun point of reference for Spotify users, this data help reinforce the company’s brand message — that Spotify is more than just another streaming music app. It aims to demonstrate that it can actually help users discover new music (Perez 2019). Each time a user shared their report, that was essentially the advertising for Spotify because then other users would want to know their “wrapped” report and other consumers who used other streaming services like Pandora, Apple Music, and etc. felt left out. This is regarded as a big win for Spotify and a loss for Apple Music, because people want to share their Wrapped reports, but unless they have Spotify and listening, there is no data to generate (Carmen 2019).

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Credible

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What you listen on Spotify, it’s your music. Wrapped reports give you personalized data. If your streaming in 2019 was Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town, Blake Shelton, and Thomas Rhett, your report will show that in 2019 you were into Country music. This allows you to connect with other country listeners, creating a connected space for you to share your love for country music and love for your favorite artist that other streaming services may not provide you.

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Emotional

When Delta and Tinder teamed up for their Wall for Singles campaign, their data revealed that 62 percent of men and 74 percent of women want a partner who shares their travel interests (Nudd 2017). Spotify provides a great way to find a mutual partner when you see their Year-End “Wrapped” report and it shows that you have a common interest in music, artists, or podcast. This can then be used to spark a conversation online or be a first date to a concert.

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Stories

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Remember the core message was simple, provide users with a report that they can use to relive their year of music. For 2019, this allowed Spotify to do something different, a Decade-end “Wrapped” report. This report was different because it now combined the music you listened to since 2009 (or when you joined) to 2019. Users then had a chance to remember their grunge faze, when they dated their now ex, first moved to their new city, or where they were when they heard the first song of their favorite band. “How do you dance to a decade’s worth of data? Especially when the last ten years have been so wild, and had such a compelling soundtrack," said Spotify's Global Executive Creative Director Alex Bodman in a statement. “With a 'Decade Wrapped,' we celebrate and show appreciation for the fortunate role we’ve been able to play over the last decade: connecting the world’s best fans with the world’s best creators. We hope we’ll remind people of the moments this decade that inspired them to smile, share, laugh—or sometimes just scratch their head. In many ways, it’s a campaign ten years in the making” (Jardine 2019).

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Conclusion

Using the SUCCESs model provided by Dan and Chip Heath, I was able to analyze the successful streaming service Spotify’s Wrapped campaign and conclude that this was an amazing marketing and promotional idea that will continue to increase the popularity of Sportify for years and will most likely try to be replicated by other music, video, and streaming services. Successful campaigns like this one start to become anticipated by the consumer at the end of each year and will begin to have non-Spotify user scratching their head asking why their provider does not offer the same. “Any other Apple Music users want to switch to Spotify just to get a decade wrap up, or is it just me?” says Eleanore Mueller (@elmueller_) on Twitter.