The wrapped effect

Spotify Wrapped landed this week. An exceptionally well-delivered time capsule of the music and podcasts you’ve consumed this year. And a glimpse into the state of your mood, vibes and tastes that even those closest to you could not identify.

This year threw me off a little though.

My top genres were unsurprising. Soft Pop, House, Indie Rock, Hip Hop and Country. My “listening age” of 21 did catch me slightly off guard (I’m almost 36 and a half years old). Supposedly listening to Justin Bieber’s new album repeatedly, for 608 minutes no less, will do that to you. What can I say, I really liked it. #belieber.

I also followed my annual tradition of sharing this with my siblings and a handful of people that I know have “eclectic” listening habits. Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Spotify has built one of the most effective marketing machines in modern business, and it relies entirely on you and me doing the promotional work for free.

I’ve been curious in the past to look into why it’s so effective and what the transferable learnings might be for other businesses. But I didn’t have a blog to put my thinking to, nor the drive to actually dig into it!

So, can SMEs actually take anything from this? And more importantly, is there a version that still works when your marketing budget lives in the “nice to have” corner of the finance team’s wallet? Or when every mention of brand or marketing makes your CEO roll their eyes? And let’s be honest, when your marketing team is basically a quarter of a person and the work-experience kid who turns up for a week at Easter.

Network effects on steroids

Spotify Wrapped started in 2015 as “Year in Music”. Basically a list of your most-played tracks. In 2016, they rebranded it as Wrapped and added shareable graphics. By 2019, an intern called Jewel Ham designed the Stories-style format that turned it into a proper social media moment.

The numbers are genuinely staggering. This year’s Wrapped hit 200 million engaged users within 24 hours. Last year, it took 62 hours to reach the same milestone. Wrapped was shared more than 500 million times this year (Techcrunch). 41% more than last year.

Half a billion shares. For a curated playlist and a few graphics!

The psychology bit

This isn’t just clever design. There’s proper behavioural science at play around our insatiable desire for curiosity. One that Spotify Wrapped exploits to the fullest.

Spotify turns our listening history into a narrative that’s both revealing and engaging (Irrational Labs). It segments our style to make it noticeable and social sharing worthy. According to Geetu Vanjani, a Senior Counsellor at the Indigo Project, sharing our Wrapped lists “becomes a way for us to share parts of ourselves that can reveal so much about who we are.” Sareena Chada, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Virginia backs this up and states that “It lets you signal both your belonging to a group and your uniqueness.”

And this is where it gets really clever. There are multiple psychological needs being met simultaneously here:

• Self-reflection. We’re curious about ourselves. What does my listening say about me?
• Social comparison. “Top 2% of listeners” is basically a badge you can brag about. Does this mean I am bragging about being in the top 2% of Justin Bieber fans? Guess so. Haters gonna hate.
• Nostalgia. Each track is a memory. That song from after you’d heard good or bad news. The workout playlist from January’s gym phase. Or when you turned your neurodivergence up to max force 10 and played Shift by Garth Stevenson 27 times to get something finished.
• Identity signalling. Music taste is one of the few personality markers that’s socially acceptable to broadcast. Posting your tax return would be weird. Posting who you listened to and for how long? That’s a bit of fun.

Copycats want the same ROI

The Wrapped format has been borrowed by basically everyone it seems. Fitness apps like Strava showcase how far users have run or cycled. Tinder has released their own personalised year-in-swipe reports.

Professor Jonathan Wilson at Regent’s University London refers to it as “bragging without the selfie.” This form of evidence-based sharing feels more authentic than overt self-promotion. You can see why copycat campaigns are appearing all over as the the numbers are hard to argue with. In the early days of Wrapped, Spotify saw app downloads increase by 21% in the first week of December 2020, with 90 million people engaging with the campaign. By 2021, 120 million users accessed their Wrapped. A fourfold increase from the 30 million in 2017 (The Decision Lab).

And it’s not just Spotify. Peacock ran a similar year-in-review campaign and saw a 20% decrease in churn over 30 days, plus a 6% higher upgrade rate from free to paid subscriptions. Grubhub’s version drove 100% more social media chatter year-on-year and an 18% lift in word-of-mouth referrals. These aren’t vanity metrics. Reduced churn. More upgrades. Actual referrals. The kind of numbers that make finance people nod approvingly.

You can play along too

Here’s where the comparisons get tricky and the cynics start to get rowdy. Spotify has 713 million users, a product team that can spend months building interactive features and over 7,000 employees. You’ve got a spreadsheet, maybe some customer data in your CRM, and marketing capacity that’s measured in hours per week rather than headcount.

But don’t be downbeat. The underlying principles still apply. The magic of Wrapped isn’t the fancy graphics. It’s three things.

1. Using data you already have to tell customers something interesting about themselves.
2. Making it personal so they feel seen rather than sold to.
3. Making it shareable so they do your marketing for you.

The question is: what data do you actually collect, and could you turn any of it into something customers would care about?

Fit your reality

Let’s be honest about constraints. You’re not building an interactive Stories experience. But you might be able to do a version of Wrapped that fits your reality.

Step 1: Audit what you actually know

Most SMEs have more customer data than they realise. Orders, support tickets, email opens, product preferences, project history. What patterns could you surface?

A B2B services firm might know how many projects you’ve worked on together, cumulative hours delivered, problems solved, turnaround times. A retailer might know purchase history, favourite categories, seasonal patterns, total spent.

Step 2: Find something worth celebrating

Wrapped works because it celebrates the customer, not the company. “You listened to 1,409 songs” is more interesting than “Spotify delivered 1,409 songs to you.”

Look for milestones. Anniversaries. Achievements. Quirky facts.

• “This year marks five years since your first order with us.”
• “You’ve bought enough coffee beans to fill a bathtub.”
• “We’ve delivered 7 projects together. More than any other client this year.”

The data needs to make your customer the protagonist.

Step 3: Keep it simple

You don’t need an app. You need one person (or a quarter of a person) who can pull the data. A template (Canva has Wrapped-style templates now). And a reason to send it. End of year, customer anniversary, milestone.

A personalised email with a few interesting stats and a shareable graphic is perfectly achievable. You’re not competing with Spotify’s design team. You’re competing with the generic “Happy Holidays from our team” email everyone else sends.

Step 4: Make it worth sharing

These campaigns tap into universal desires for self-expression, recognition and connection. People share when content makes them look interesting, successful or connected to something they value.

Give them something they’d want to post. A badge. A ranking. A funny fact. Even “You were in our top 10% of customers this year” is something worth sharing.

The insight nugget

The research on personalisation is pretty clear. 71% of customers expect personalised experiences, with 76% expressing frustration when they don’t receive them. Companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalisation than their slower-growing counterparts, according to McKinsey.

But personalisation doesn’t have to mean AI recommendation engines and dynamic content platforms. It can mean using the information you have about a specific customer to show them you actually know who they are.

Wrapped succeeds because it makes users feel understood. It reflects their behaviour back at them in a way that’s surprising, flattering, or at least conversation-worthy.

For SMEs, the opportunity isn’t to copy Spotify’s execution. It’s to copy the underlying idea. Use what you know about customers to make them feel seen.

The bottom line

Spotify Wrapped proves that customers will actively promote your business if you give them content worth sharing. The formula is simple. Make them the hero, use data to tell their story, make it easy to share.

You probably can’t build an interactive year-in-review experience. But you can pull customer data, find something interesting or celebratory, and create a personalised moment that cuts through the noise of generic holiday marketing.

And if nothing else, it’s better than the “Season’s Greetings from all of us at [Company Name]” email with a stock photo of a Christmas tree.

Though I’ll accept that marketing advice from a member of Spotify’s “Cloud State Society” club might not meet your standards.