#SpotifyWrapped 2022: A Successful Marketing Campaign

A. INTRODUCTION

Spotify Wrapped was launched by Spotify, a music-listening platform, firstly in 2016 and has become an anticipated event in the end of the year. The idea of the event is to collect users’ data from the beginning of the year to reveal their listening behaviour, including top artists, songs, albums, etc, in pictures of a kaleidoscope. Spotify believe that everyone is unique, so they will have different results in their kaleidoscope. Therefore, Spotify encourages users to share it across social media platforms and enjoy the diversity (Spotify, 2022a). As this campaign has grown since 2016, Spotify Wrapped came back in 2022 with some improvements in which users can also see the amount of time they spent on Spotify throughout the year, listening personality, and audio day (Spotify, 2022b).

The Spotify Wrapped 2022 campaign seems to target its users who actively participate on social media platforms as Spotify encourages them to join the campaign by sharing their wrapped through those platforms. By doing that, users participate in promoting Spotify as a music-listening platform. Besides, this campaign also aimed to connect artists and listeners as it highlighted the two-way relationship among them. Therefore, Spotify did not just create a kaleidoscope for users or listeners, but also for artists and podcasters so they can understand more about their fans’ listening behaviours (Doerrer, 2022).

B. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

1. Participation, User-Generated Content, and Produsage

Participating on online media can be done by creating content, sharing, liking, etc. It needs resources such as time, skills, money, and passion. According to this notion, media production is considered as the highest level of participation. The pyramid of participation shows that with the high demand of resources, active contributors are on the top of the pyramid and that the number is very small compared to the “lurkers”, those who do not contribute to the community (Jenkins et al., 2013).

As users use their resources to produce media and publish it on their online platform, they are fulfilling the notion of user-generated content. In the past, publishers were required to make content accessible to a big audience. Nowadays, social media allows users to do it through their platform and the shift from content-consuming behaviour to content-generating behaviour is the key aspect of social media (Wyrwoll, 2014).

The notion of produsage is combining “production” and “usage”. It means that users who generate content or on the production side can continue to keep their role as audience who exploit other’s content, even as they generate and distribute their own content (Jenkins et al., 2013).

2. Self-Presentation of Online Identity

The concept of self-presentation is that people can control how they want to be seen by other people and prevent other people from seeing the “backstage” or the parts of themselves that they want to hide. Therefore, to preserve a certain persona of oneself to another person, social media users diligently monitor, manage, and present the self in a particular way, whether through profile picture, description, posting behaviour, etc (Attrill, 2015).

C. CASE STUDY

The heart of the Spotify Wrapped 2022 campaign is its users. After presenting the wrapped result in pictures/ cards, which reminds users about their loyalty and precious moments with Spotify throughout the year, Spotify put a share button under the kaleidoscope cards to encourage users to participate in the campaign by sharing it on their social media with the hashtag #SpotifyWrapped. Therefore, it supports the idea of participation, user-generated content, and produsage. While the main contents in the form of pictures are provided by Spotify, users can personalise the content before they share it. For instance, if they share it on Instagram story, they can add comments, stickers, songs, etc depending on the features available on the platform. In the end, while they are sharing their own Spotify Wrapped content, they can still enjoy their peers’ content, make a comment on it or even reshare.

(Spotify, 2022a)

Spotify Wrapped also support the idea of online self-presentation. By participating in the campaign, social media users who present themselves as a fan of a certain musician, for example, Super Junior, can proudly share their Spotify Wrapped if the result shows that they listen a lot to Super Junior. They can show their loyalty within the fan community or general audience. Therefore, Spotify Wrapped facilitate its users to strengthen their online identity.

Moreover, Spotify also seems to mediate parasocial relationships between fans and artists by providing thank-you videos from various artists to their top listeners. These thank-you videos can be considered as professional self-disclosure that will trigger social presence and positively collate with parasocial relationships (Kim & Song, 2016). Through this one-way communication, fans might feel involved and think that those artists are socially present in their lives.

Wrapped results can be shared through various platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. In 2022, Spotify also allow users to share their wrapped on Line and WhatsApp stories. Spotify seems to have chosen the most widely used platforms. With an understanding that each platform attracts different audiences, Spotify expands the platform availability to get more engagements (Mahoney & Tang, 2017). Spotify users might have their favourite platform to share their wrapped results. For instance, not everyone fancy an Instagram story, others might prefer to share it on a more private platform such as WhatsApp. The various available platforms also allow Spotify users to share their wrapped results on more than one platform and it will most likely be desired by Spotify as it potentially leads to better engagement.

With the improvements that Spotify made in 2022, they brought more than 400 million Tweets, 17% increase in engagement, and 22% increase in unique authors (Woods, 2022). The fact that Spotify can get free promotion from users who share their wrapped across social media might also be the key success of the campaign. Those who are not interested in using Spotify will probably download and start using it because of this exciting campaign that has become a ritual at the end of every year. Meanwhile, old users as they feel rewarded by the wrapped will potentially stay on the platform and happily anticipate next year wrapped.

D. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, Spotify Wrapped 2022 is a successful campaign that empowers its users to blow up the campaign by providing content to be shared while users are still able to modify it. Spotify facilitates its users to strengthen their online identity as fans, while also mediating the parasocial relationship.

Bibliography

Attrill, A. (2015). The manipulation of online self-presentation create, edit, re-edit and present. Basingstoke, Palgrave Pivot.

Doerrer, B. (2022, December 1). Spotify Wrapped 2022 aims to connect listeners and artists | Advertising. Campaign Asia. https://www.campaignasia.com/article/spotify-wrapped-2022-aims-to-connect-listeners-and-artists/482406

Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media : Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York University Press.

Kim, J., & Song, H. (2016). Celebrity’s self-disclosure on Twitter and parasocial relationships: A mediating role of social presence. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 570–577. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.03.083

Mahoney, L. M., & Tang, T. (2017). Strategic social media : from marketing to social change. Wiley-Blackwell.

Spotify. (2022a, November 30). Everything You Need to Know about 2022 Wrapped. Spotify. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-11-30/everything-you-need-to-know-about-2022-wrapped/

Spotify. (2022b, November 30). Marie Rönn, Global Group Creative Director, Works Across Spotify To Bring Wrapped 2022 to Life. Spotify. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-11-30/marie-roenn-global-group-creative-director-works-across-spotify-to-bring-wrapped-2022-to-life/

Woods, K. (2022, December 7). Spotify Wrapped: What marketers can learn from the viral campaign. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/spotify-wrapped/

Wyrwoll, C. (2014). Social Media Fundamentals, Models, and Ranking of User-Generated Content. Wiesbaden Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Imprint: Springer Vieweg.