How the 2020 Spotify Wrapped Marketing Campaign Boosted Engagement
Reading Time: 5 minutes
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In 2017, Spotify launched Wrapped as a successor of the ‘Year in Music’ campaign, intending to create FOMO (fear of missing out). This helped Spotify introduce a cascading Flywheel effect by enticing new users to download and use their app for longer. Since then, every year, Spotify users look forward to their Spotify Wrapped stories, while non-Spotify users (like me) feel excluded.
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For those who are out of the loop, Spotify, an audio-streaming platform, lets you relive all the musical discoveries you’ve had and all the tracks you loved in the past year. You can check the total time you’ve spent listening to songs, the number of different songs you’ve played, the artists you’ve listened to, and your top genres. Spotify also tells what top percentile of listeners you were in for specific artists.
The impact of Spotify Wrapped 2020
In 2020, Spotify Wrapped was responsible for increasing Spotify’s mobile app downloads by 21% in the first week of December.
Users from the United States and India make up about 33% of global Spotify mobile app users, contributing to the highest growth in both app downloads and DAUs.
Here’s a list of countries where app downloads grew by the most in the first week of December 2020:
| Country (in order of total downloads) | Increase in app downloads |
| United States | 20% |
| India | 19% |
| Russia | 16% |
| France | 21% |
Earlier, users could check their Wrapped data on Spotify’s website only. This year, however, Spotify Wrapped was made exclusively available on mobile for Spotify users, while Wrapped’s web experience was built for non-Spotify users. Spotify also added a few new features like in-app quizzes (to guess top podcasts, top artists, and which decade’s songs a user streamed the most), a ‘Story of Your 2020’, new Wrapped badges, personalized playlists, and customization options for social sharing.
All of these helped increase user activity on Spotify’s mobile app.
So, what makes Spotify Wrapped arguably the best Marketing campaign to acquire more users?
Spotify Wrapped is Influencer Marketing at its finest
After Artist Wrapped is launched, multiple musicians and podcasters thank their Spotify listeners on social media platforms. Here are a few tweets highlighting this gesture:
Musicians massively dominate the list of accounts with the most social media followers. 10 out of the top 20 most-followed accounts on Twitter (source) and 9 out of the top 20 most-followed accounts on Instagram (source) belong to musicians.
By mentioning Spotify and adding screenshots in their posts, the brand’s reach amplifies to hundreds of millions of users organically.
💡 Takeaways for audio and video streaming services:
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Due to the overwhelming traction on these posts, you’ll notice #spotifywrapped trending on all social platforms. If something is trending on the internet, can memes be far behind?
User-generated content builds FOMO on social media
“Who controls the memes,
controls the Universe”
– Elon Musk, circa 2020 (source)
Multiple memes flooded social media during the first week of December 2020. If you do not use Spotify for listening to music or podcasts, then you will find the following memes relatable:
Similar to how memes played a key role in the growth of the viral game Among Us, user-generated content is a big reason behind Spotify Wrapped’s success – the memes make you want to switch your go-to audio streaming platform to Spotify! A large number of memes involve Spotify’s competitor, Apple Music. Users jumping ship from competitors like Apple Music to Spotify also contribute to the growth in app downloads.
Spotify Wrapped induces competition organically
It is human nature to want to compare yourself with others. Thanks to the Wrapped campaign, Spotify created a sense of competition and achievement without using monetary incentives.
To encourage Spotify users to share their listening data on social media, the brand used a combination of personalized data and jazzy graphics with bold colors. By launching Spotify Wrapped on mobile apps, Spotify also made it easier for its users to share their Wrapped stories on social media. These images rapidly made their way to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook.
Spotify’s Top Fans feature is a great way to introduce competition. By looking at how many minutes your friend has listened to and what their top albums/artists were, you tend to compete with them.
New users acquired by Spotify this way will stick for longer. This is because these users want their own Wrapped story, making them more likely to use Spotify for the entire year.
💡 Takeaways for audio and video streaming services:
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Conclusion
Spotify allows its users to support their favorite artists and discover new music at the same time. For an audio streaming platform like Spotify, maintaining a healthy DAU/MAU ratio is important.
Spotify Wrapped has proven to be a great way to acquire new users, get them to use the app more, and make them stick around for longer. By making it easier to share Wrapped stories on social media through mobile devices, Spotify showcased a perfect example of Product-led Growth as well.
For more resources on improving User Engagement and Retention on your audio streaming platform, check out our A-Z guide on Mobile Marketing:
