Spotify Wrapped 2023: How It Became a Viral and Widely Copied Marketing Tactic

Spotify Wrapped has gone viral, with 120 million users accessing it in 2021. The campaign has been praised and criticized.

Spotify's annual summary of a user's most played songs and artists has evolved from a marketing ploy to a yearly social media sensation, inspiring other music streaming services and companies like Duolingo and Reddit to create their own shareable year-in-review summaries. The number of users accessing their Wrapped in 2021 was a staggering 120 million, a fourfold increase from 2017, with 60 million users sharing their Wrapped graphics on social media.

Since its inception in 2015, Spotify's Wrapped campaign has expanded to include a user's top five most played artists, songs, and genres, as well as personalized playlists of their 100 most streamed songs from the year. Each year, new features are added to Wrapped, such as the "listening personality" feature in 2020 and the "audio aura" in 2021. This campaign has become increasingly popular, with 400 million posts on social media platform X about Spotify Wrapped in the three days following its 2022 release, a 15% increase from the previous year.

Spotify has received praise for its Wrapped campaign from other advertisers, with many commending its fan-driven nature and shareability on social media. However, some have criticized the campaign for relying on tracking user data, with concerns raised about privacy and surveillance practices. Despite these criticisms, Spotify Wrapped has become a viral sensation, with companies and politicians creating memes and parodies based on the format.

The release date of Spotify Wrapped 2023 remains unknown, but based on previous years, it is expected to drop at the end of November or early December. The campaign continues to be a key marketing strategy for Spotify, driving user engagement and app downloads.