Spotify has had something magical for a number of years.
The wrap of the year.
Super Smart
It’s super smart, why?
It’s completely personalised, it plays back what you already likely knew but will give you a couple of surprises, it reinforces what you thought, it explores your internal curiosity, it drives our inbuilt competitor, you want to compare against friends, social media followers and luckily if you are on social media, you can compare against strangers. The likelihood is it ended up on stories, group chat and source of zoom calls and FaceTimes.
These are all wins for the listener but also Spotify, at scale this plays into networks, builds teams of people joining in their love of 90’s RnB, of nostalgic boybands and being early on listening to Christmas music which seemed surprisingly popular this year.
Playlists are not unique on Spotify but are part of their DNA and this is a way to connect listeners together.
Human Connection
We share for a number of reasons, but one that key, as humans we are built to be part of something, to be connected to other humans as that’s how we survived and evolved from cave-people to being part of the tribe, to building villages and onwards.
Performative 2020
Social media has become a performance platform for so many people, why not share some of the most personal information? You become part of something alongside showing off just enough to receive some feedback from a like, a reaction or a comment question your choice of music or this podcast.
A Quick Co-brand
End of year personalised reviews is smart ways to market.
Leveraging millions of your subscribers to share your brand across as many networks as possible.
Artist Spotlight
Including the artist is smart, for instance, many artists dislike the pay structure but it is a necessary evil for them but providing them with their stream data will act in the same way as the listener data and you see how many millions of streams the artist has had.
The Other Side
Mariah Carey makes roughly $16k per day from Spotify streams in November and December for All I Want for Christmas (artists are only paid on average $0.004 per stream), so there is an angle here where Spotify or third parties could share this information and leverage the trend.
It’s Not Easy
End of year reviews are hard, the data set is huge, the design phase is difficult and getting it to become a digestible piece of information on something new is extremely challenging.
In previous roles, the team(s) and I have implemented this and it took huge amounts of work, it took a dedicated and talented project lead and a designer with a lot of skill and patience. Believe it or not, if you have a data set it isn’t as easy as plug and play.
Opportunity? Your Own Take
If you have a product that is used regularly and has a number of interesting data points, you do not have to wait for the end of the year to be over, you can leverage many different events or have a wrap-up style workstream from within your product.
One of the products we had was very much a one and done (use once and no need to come back regularly) and we had great success in leveraging the end of the experience and providing similar insights and was shared a lot.
Daily league tables, comparison tools etc all work well if you have the team and engineering capacity to do this.
Spotify, Apple Music etc have many millions of users so they drive interest and build a short behaviour, alongside being able to share their top x albums, tracks, artists and this year podcasts. Will you? Map out these areas of high interest and see if you have the influence to do this.
Growth Wrap Up?
If you have a growth team, this would be a perfect project for them to build out as a SWOT team and bring in the departmental experts.
An Idea💡
One element that appears to be missing is connecting each other and gamification between groups of people, it would be ideal for friends and teams…
Protagonist x Director Roles
If you have hundreds of thousands of users and personalised enough (without being too sensitive) you can do it, what you will need to understand is your unique spin, your unique data point and what is rich enough to drive comparison and the performance angle of putting the user front and centre of the glory, the protagonist in the story and you being the director in the background enabling such a great performance.
Wraps up are smart, they take a lot of work and energy but are very rewarding for the brand and for users. If you can offer something unique and at a different time of the year its something you should look at digging into and releasing, especially with the size of the opportunity and gaining cut through with other marketing campaigns can be challenging with the negative news cycles.