The Science Behind Spotify Wrapped: Tracking 500M Users

Spotify collects millions of events across all of these different mediums. Every time you log into Spotify, every action you take in the app is captured as an event and then sent to a central location (most likely a data lake or a data warehouse), where that data can later be transformed, modeled, and analyzed for future use.

Data Modeling

Once this data has been ingested into a single repository, Spotify’s data team is able to join it together easily to compute metrics on top of all their user data to answer questions at both a global level and an individual level. This includes everything from:

• Favorite songs, albums, and artists
• Minutes listened
• Favorite playlists
• Listening personality

To calculate these metrics, the data team has to combine millions of events and aggregate this data for every single user, which is a huge data modeling and data science task. The amount of processing power that Spotify has to purchase for this type of complex number crunching is probably extremely high.

Personalization And Activation

The final layer of the Spotify Wrapped campaign is the actual delivery and personalization to the end user across marketing channels and product experiences. While some of Spotify’s systems may be able to read directly from their databases, Reverse ETL pipelines can be used to push the granular data points out from the data warehouse to whatever systems and channels it's needed in.

When Spotify first launched Wrapped in 2016, Data Activation was a complex and resource-intensive process to stand up and maintain. For companies launching Spotify Wrapped-like campaigns today, the emergence of Reverse ETL has simplified this process.

What Makes Spotify Wrapped so Successful?

On the surface, it’s easy to think that Spotify Wrapped is just a really personalized marketing campaign (which it is), but there are a couple of reasons why the campaign has proven to be hugely successful year after year.

1. Inherent Value: Spotify Wrapped provides inherent value without asking for anything in return. All you have to do is use Spotify, and you’re automatically enrolled in this marketing campaign. It’s a tangible way to see just how much value you received from the app.
2. Virality: The campaign is designed to go viral. Spotify lets you easily share your “Wraps” on social media directly from the app. This means that once per year, Spotify is able to weaponize millions of users to promote their product for free, and that’s not something you can place a value on.
3. FOMO: Anyone not using Spotify is barred from engaging or participating in Spotify Wrapped. Seeing others share their music trends immediately makes you want to get involved and download the app so you can participate.

Closing Thoughts

Spotify Wrapped is one of the most successful marketing campaigns in the 21st century. In 2020, the campaign increased app downloads by 20 percent, and in 2022, it was estimated that the campaign was shared over 100 million times on social media. If you think about this campaign from Spotify’s viewpoint, it’s basically the north star for the entire organization, and it’s the pinnacle of everything the company does. Almost every team across the business works on this campaign in some capacity.

Today, every company is looking for a competitive advantage. If you truly want to stay “top-of-mind” with your customers, then you need to deliver value without expecting anything in return. Spotify Wrapped asks nothing of the user, but it gives everything. The campaign is individualized at an extremely personalized level that’s not easily replicable. If you’re interested in launching your own year-in-review campaign or tackling any type of complex personalization use case like this, book a demo with one of our solution engineers, and we will walk you through the process.