Once a year, Spotify interrupt your morning routine of listening to music in the shower or on the way to work to post ‘Wrapped‘, a personalized annual summary in which each user details which artists, songs and genres they have listened to the most. And, like every year, the willingness of people to share their musical interests floods the social networksturning the platform’s lists into a guaranteed success.
This Wednesday the phenomenon was repeated. In a few minutes, Spotify became a trend in Spain with more than 2.6 million mentions on Twitter, while the hashtag #2020Wrapped received more than 800,000. In the stories public of Instagram or in the private chats of WhatsAppusers shared their podium with friends and followers, opening the door to the great digital debate that cements the campaign of the largest music platform in streaming of the world. What is your success? Why are we freaked out by sharing the music we listen to?
Music as a personal construction
Music has a strong emotional component. It can make us think, induce nostalgia or lift our mood. But, beyond that, it plays a key role in the social and cultural cohesion between individuals. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu already analyzed in the last century, selectively sharing our musical tastes —as well as with movies, series, or books— is a method of building identity that we want to project to society, something that defines and reinforces our belonging to a certain group.
In 2006, a study published in the journal ‘Psychological Science’ revealed that students who met on the Internet were more likely to talk about their musical preferences in order to better understand each other’s personality. Those who listen to the same music as us tend to like us better, another study noted in 2011. With the advent of digital platforms and our constant exposure to them, this phenomenon has intensified.
The philosopher Eudald Espluga goes further and points out that “the imperative of self-expression” behind sharing these lists responds to a “productivist pressure”. “Under platform capitalism we are forced to act as our own entrepreneurs. More than a narcissistic or vain drive to stand out or get attention, this competition responds to a structural political condition, which commits us to an economy of neoliberal subjectivity where we have to constantly self-produce ”, he points out.
Users as ‘influencers’ of the brand
Conscious of it, Spotify used that factor to relaunch its brand and achieve greater interaction with its users. Until 2016, it published lists with the best of the year, but in 2017 it decided to use its databases to personalize those lists with rankings and statistics that explain our tastes and consumption habits. The decision was an instant success. If your list reflects a guilty pleasure, perhaps you keep it to yourself, but if the result confirms your vision, it leads you to want to share it with others, whether by identifying yourself as a fan of Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift or a local punk-rock group. He only plays in small rooms.
Hitting at that point, Spotify manages to get users to act as ‘influencers’ of the brand, thus organically generating a great debate on social networks that is transformed into a powerful and free advertising campaign. This echo also reaches the media, which helps to amplify the campaign. Such is their goal: lists carefully designed so that we want to share them. Its graphics, images, colors and square format match perfectly with platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat. “With a very simple and cheap resource, Spotify gains a lot of visibility and eats up its competitors for a week,” he explains. Pablo Porcar, founder of the music magazine Binaural and co-director of the communication agency for bands Blanco Impala. “In addition, creating those custom lists creates a very important new listening loop.”
Capture new users
The interaction between Spotify and its users allows the platform to pursue an economic objective. “’Wrapped’ also creates this FOMO effect that attracts new users to consider using Spotify, so it’s a domino effect,” he confessed in 2017. June Sauvagetthe company’s global head of product marketing.
FOMO (fear of being left out, in English) is how social anxiety is known to not live the life that others project. Thus, the bombardment of these lists in networks serves to generate jealousy and seduce potential users who use other platforms. As has happened in other years, these days memes have circulated ridiculing those who do not have access to their annual lists.
The strategy is refined each year to feed our curiosity to know ourselves and others. In 2018 the most listened to astrological symbols were added; in 2019 the lists were extended to the most listened to of the decade (as a reaction to the plagiarism of Apple Music of those lists) and this year statistics on podcasts have been added, small tests about our tastes, highlighting if you are among the best fans of an artist and rewards such as labeling yourself a “pioneer” if you have heard a song “before it was cool ”, that is, before it reached 50,000 views.
That arouses not only our curiosity about others, but also competitiveness. To increase that FOMO, Spotify has also published the global charts of the most popular artists in the open. All these factors make these lists a viral trend year after year.
And our privacy?
While the image of the technological giants is degraded by their involvement in data scandals, campaigns like this one relaunch the popularity of Spotify, which improves the interaction of its users with the brand and their feeling of belonging. Unlike our search history or our private conversations, revealing the music we listen to is seen as a harmless curiosity.
However, Spotify knows more than that about us. Its more than 286 million users per month spend an average of 25 hours per month connected, time to collect personal data that improves how its algorithm knows your tastes, but also your moods. As science journalist Haley Weiss noted in ‘The Atlantic’ in 2018, the success and popularity of ‘Wrapped’ “may reveal more about our love of music than about the protection of our data.”