Clip-art image created by Valeria Ruiz
On November 29, 2023, Spotify, an audio streaming service released its Spotify Wrapped. Spotify Wrapped is a compilation of a user’s top five artists and songs of the year as well as how many minutes the user spent listening to music. The marketing campaign has been around since 2016, but has recently added a new feature that presents places around the world that have similar listening habits. Along with this, they’ve added ‘Thank You’ messages presented by the user’s top artists.
“I felt like it was directed just to me for being her number one fan.”
– Daniel Correa, a teacher at South Salem High School said.
Another streaming service that’s considered competition to Spotify started a similar marketing campaign. Apple Music Replay started in 2019 and demonstrates a user’s top fifteen artists, fifteen songs and minutes listened to each artist. Even though incredibly similar to Spotify Wrapped, many users plan to switch to Spotify for the upcoming year.
“I have already switched to Spotify for the upcoming year,” Ben Coven-Goebel ‘26 said, “Spotify is much better than Apple Music, I was just put on Apple Music from the start.”
A differentiator between the two is that Spotify also presents fun characters for users varying on their music tastes. For example, those who listened to more emotional tunes were presented with “Vampire.” Those who listened to more up-beat music were most likely presented with “Luminary.”
Comparing and contrasting music tastes is considered by many to be a great way to end a user’s year-long musical journey.
