Wrapped by Design

2024 is the 8th year of Spotify Wrapped, the music platform’s annual campaign that tells you what you’ve been listening to for the past year. It is simple: your data, wrapped in bright colors and leaderboards. And yet, we love it. Every year, social media is flooded with everyone’s favorite songs and artists, and Spotify cashes in.

This is a delightful user experience. It comes around once a year and affects our limbic system, the part of our brains that evokes emotions and memories.

In the past few years, Wrapped has become a blueprint for other companies, too. Apple Music has Replay. Amazon Music just debuted Delivered. They follow the same formula that has been working so well for Spotify. Even non music apps have joined in. Udemy shows you how many minutes you spent learning, while Loom shares how many meetings you’ve potentially eliminated by creating videos. Duolingo takes a different approach by showing how your language learning compares with others’ and if you’ve done enough lessons to be “safe” from Duo, the owl.

But it all comes back to the first mover — the brand that currently has roughly 30% market share in the music streaming space, Spotify. Sharing a yearly review is not exactly a new concept. We’ve gotten yearbooks in school, and Apple has been sharing its top apps for years now. What did Spotify do to make Wrapped become synonymous with end-of-year excellence?

It’s all in the design.

Music is a user experience like no other. It is visceral. It makes us laugh and cry, or even recall a person or place. Wrapped works so well with its user base because it’s an ongoing yearbook that tells us what we have gone through in the past year. It gives us clues that only we, or those special to us, would understand. It brings us back to that trip from the summer time, or how we got through that tough breakup. Only we know why a song or artist makes us feel the way we do. On a personal level, this is a user experience that deeply understands who we are, whoever we are.

Spotify is an example of how the Internet has changed what culture is forever. Consider how segmented it is the way everyone absorbs entertainment. No longer are 105.9 million people tuning in at one time for the M*A*S*H season finale. Now, entertainment is consumed by binging on one’s own time. Why wouldn’t music be different? We live in a time that is personalized to the degree that two people can be sitting beside one another listening to two completely different things. The time to share music is not in a living room over a record player. In 2024, the time to share is when Wrapped comes along and emotions are running high.

The irony, of course, is that the pull of “emotions” is juxtaposed with the very thing that is free of feeling — data. We’re the same people that ask companies not to take our data, but once Wrapped comes along, we’re happy to share how many times we’ve listened to Taylor Swift with all of our Instagram followers.

I love understanding why a design works. What is it about a particular design that resonates with a user that wouldn’t work if certain criteria were taken away? Design gives things a soul, even something as lifeless as data.

But is it all the music? What about what we see when we open Wrapped? Does the visual design play a part as well?

In 2015, Spotify presented a Year in Review, a stripped down version of what Wrapped would become a year later. The feature offered a playlist of the top songs and artists from 2015. But it would be another calendar year until the virality of Wrapped would take over social media.

Let’s consider what Spotify called this 2016 feature. Wrapped. An allusion to a time in December that many of us can recall from our childhoods – brightly colored wrapping paper that we can rip through on a December morning. Just look at the bold colors being used and tell me they aren’t supposed to resemble Christmas presents as subtle skeuomorphism. Combine that with the music that recalls a past time and you get peak nostalgia.

When a brand gets something right, it’s attached to a half-life that will most likely decrease over time. Spotify figured out the formula, but with others copying it, will we still be talking about Wrapped in five years? Will better data through generative AI make us switch our preference of music streaming platform? Or, like Mariah Carey, will Spotify resurrect every December to give us a brightly colored gift, personalized and set to music?

Check out the complimentary post on Instagram