Spotify Is Allowing Artists To Include Personal Video Messages In This Year’s Spotify Wrapped

Source: Spotify

The beginning of November means that Spotify Wrapped isn't too far away. For those who aren't familiar, Spotify Wrapped is a personalized data-backed recap of users' listening from the year based on their activity.

A Cultural Moment

Since launching in 2016, Wrapped has become a cultural moment, with everyone running to their favorite social media platforms to share the artists, songs, and podcasts they listened to the most that year. Over the years, the recap has become more interactive and easier to share with viewers.

Artists Get A Chance To Be Involved

On the artist side, it’s been a relatively hands-off process. But this year, Spotify is allowing artists to be more directly involved. They can record and upload a 30-second video to be included in the Wrapped experience for their top fans. They can also showcase their top merchandise, highlight upcoming show dates, and encourage their fans to donate to their causes.

What This Means For Artists

Artists can show their appreciation to their fans through merch, show tickets, and donation integrations. With artists reaching their top supporters across Spotify, they can engage with those who are more likely to come out of their pocket. Artists can already do this with social media platforms, but Spotify Wrapped allows them to get in front of a targeted audience in a more personalized way. Plus, with listeners being able to share their Wrapped with friends, there is the potential for artists to benefit even more.

What Social Media Platforms Can Learn

Spotify has created something special with Wrapped. Not only does it bring massive awareness to the company through organic sharing, but it helps its artists in doing so. Social media platforms like Facebook (Year In Review) and other streaming services like Apple Music (Replay) have attempted to do something similar, but none have gained the amount of traction that Wrapped does.

While it hasn’t worked yet, it doesn’t mean that social media platforms shouldn’t think about creating a similar experience. With more attention on creators and particularly short-form videos, now seems an ideal time for platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to create their own version of Wrapped. They could leverage all their user data and create personalized, shareable recaps for their short-form video features, such as what creators, videos, and sounds users watched the most from the past year. And just like Spotify this year, they could allow creators to deliver personalized messages to their top fans and pitch them subscriptions, tipping, or any other fan-funding monetization tools.