Unwrapping Spotify Wrapped

The Future. Spotify Wrapped unrolled this week to spur a blitz of social media engagement to see what our friends, family, and, maybe, our enemies are streaming. With the rollout of Wrapped being a surprise every year, Spotify has potentially made the feature the most important end-of-the-year list… and the most vital annual marketing moment for the company.

Welcome to Sound Town
Spotify Wrapped dropped this week to give users, artists, and industry analysts a peek into listening trends around the world.

• First, the music: Taylor Swift unseated three-year reigning champ Bad Bunny as the most-listened-to artist globally (Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti was the most-streamed album), while Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” was the most-streamed song.
• This year also included podcasts, topped by heavyweight title The Joe Rogan Experience… but TSwift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, also charted, with New Heights crowned as the most-streamed sports podcast.
• Additionally, it included video messages from 40,000 artists that were sent to users who had them listed as their most-listened-to artist.
• There were also new features, such as “Me in 23,” a label for what kind of Spotify user you are (make lots of playlists, listen to an album straight through, etc.) and “Sound Town,” which matched a user with a town that shares overall similar listening habits.

Speaking of Sound Town, it was trending on socials that a seemingly disproportionate number of users got Burlington, Vermont — a location paired with artists like Fiona Apple and Father John Misty — despite the ability to be paired with 1,300 locations.

While Spotify got a kick out of the conspiracy theories, it shared that, of the platform’s 574 million users, 0.6% were paired with Burlington. That’s about 3.4 million people… still a lot considering it’s 75x times more than the town’s population.