What the Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign taught us — and how we used those learnings

At Scribly, we’re not just content marketing professionals. We’re content marketing learnaholics. You only need to count the number of under- and post-graduate degrees we have between us or attend one of our internal content marketing discussions to see that we love to learn and stay informed about the latest trends. 

And while we’re a small business for small businesses, we also love to gather content marketing insights and inspiration from across different industries and company sizes. That includes the biggest and best in marketing, like Spotify.

In this blog, we’re looking at one of our favorite marketing campaigns: Spotify Wrapped. We explain why this marketing strategy is so effective and how we adapt and scale the principles guiding its success in our own marketing.

What is Spotify Wrapped?

Spotify Wrapped is a personalized annual round-up of the music and podcasts a listener has streamed that year. Insights are shared as a fun presentation and reveal your top artists, genres, and songs.

The Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign was first released in 2015 and has been an incredibly popular and successful initiative for the platform. Each year, people wait with bated breath for their Wrapped to be revealed, then head to social media to share their results with friends. This leads to tons of free advertising for Spotify and boosts the company’s organic reach, all while providing true value for users.

Why the Spotify Wrapped marketing strategy is a masterclass in viral content

Let’s break down why Spotify Wrapped has become a cultural phenomenon and what makes this marketing campaign so successful.

Your year in audio or “value creation”

Spotify’s approach to value creation sets the Spotify Wrapped marketing strategy apart. 

Wrapped adds value by telling the story of each user’s year back to them through their personal music tastes, evoking a sense of nostalgia and creating an emotional connection with the platform. It centers the user as the star in the story by showing them their unique listening habits, favorite songs, artists, and genres — all things that are inherently tied to someone’s identity.

The presentation of your “year in music” is full of fun visuals and your favorite music. It’s a delight to scroll through. You also get a Wrapped playlist that collects all your top tracks into one easily accessible place, encouraging users to continue using Spotify. The value creation offered by Wrapped advertises the platform, promotes its continued use, and — most importantly — gives something worthwhile back to the users.

A conversation starter or “shareable content”

People sharing their year in music with friends, family, and followers on social media is a large part of the frenzy surrounding Wrapped. It’s designed to be easily shareable. With the quick click of a button, users can showcase their music tastes, create conversations with like-minded folks, and transform individual listening patterns into shareable moments of self-expression. 

On Spotify Wrapped day, you can almost guarantee your social media feeds will be flooded with colorful graphics showcasing people’s listening habits, generating a TON of organic reach for Spotify. This inevitably leads to spikes in new downloads for the platform each December (engaging a record 227 million monthly active users in 2023.) 

Plus, since users (not Spotify) share their own Wrapped, this flood of marketing doesn’t feel like an advertisement. Instead, it builds immense social proof for the company. People see their friends sharing Wrapped playlists and think, “Oh, that’s cool. Maybe I should download Spotify too…”

Only on Spotify or “the FOMO effect”

In 2019, Spotify’s former Head of Consumer and Product Marketing, June Sauvaget, described the Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign as having a “FOMO effect.”  FOMO, AKA “fear of missing out,” plays on everyone’s natural desire to be included. When we see other people engaging with something interesting, we inherently want to be included, too.

Since you can only engage with Wrapped if you are a Spotify subscriber, it provides a strong incentive for people to download the platform and join in on the fun. People who don’t have Spotify find themselves left out of the conversation, unable to share their year in music, creating that FOMO effect. Each year, people download Spotify just to be included in the next Wrapped. 

How we use Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign principles at Scribly

You might be thinking, “What can a small business like me (or Scribly) learn from the marketing strategies of industry giants like Spotify?” These companies have seemingly unlimited resources to create viral marketing strategies that gobble up public attention and dominate media headlines.

At first glance, the Spotify Wrapped marketing strategy may not seem applicable to you and your business, but at Scribly, we try to adapt and scale the principles that drive success for these industry giants. Here’s how: 

1. Celebrating client successes

As a business, we wanted to create that same emotional connection with our clients as the Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign creates with listeners by showcasing the true value of our work together. 

Scribly provides clients with a quarterly report summarizing the key progress made towards your KPIs. And while tracking quarter-on-quarter progress is a useful way for us to check our strategy works and adapt our approach accordingly, it can also be nice to look back on an entire year’s work. 

That’s where our version of Spotify Wrapped — Scribly Rewind — came in.

We created a personalized email newsletter for each client that celebrated our key successes of the year, from year-to-date organic traffic growth to the top SERP positions achieved to the most popular blogs published. 

We designed it with Scribly’s signature colors and animations to make it visually appealing and easily digestible. We also included a catchy subject line and preview message to encourage interactions. This email series had a 100% open rate. 

2. Building virality (on the right scale) 

Spotify Wrapped is designed to be shared on a mass scale. Celebrities with millions of followers even post their results. 

At Scribly, our goal was never to create viral-worthy content like Spotify. Instead, we wanted our campaign to be a fun way to demonstrate the value of our service to our existing customers without being overly sales-y. 

However, we did want it to be shareable on a localized scale. We hoped its eye-catching design and stand-out results might spark internal conversations. For example, the marketing manager we work with might share it with the company’s CEO to prove how beneficial our mutual relationship is and why it’s a worthy investment (because our clients’ successes are our successes!) 

We also hoped it might be a useful referral tool — and it paid off. Our client Tweedmaker shared their Scribly Rewind with their sister brand, Tweedtopper, and now we’re working with them, too. 

3. Turning feedback into FOMO

We also knew that Scribly Rewind wouldn’t create FOMO en masse the way the Spotify Wrapped marketing campaign does, so we scaled and adapted our approach. 

The best way for us to excite customers about future opportunities with Scribly (or create something close to that Wrapped FOMO effect) was to demonstrate our continued desire to deliver bigger and better results. We followed up the campaign with a “Rate your year with Scribly” survey to gather client feedback and learn how we could improve moving forward. 

We said we’re life-long learners — and we meant it. We’re always willing to evolve and refine our approach to match our clients’ needs.

Within the survey email, we also offered a sneak peek at some new services, creating FOMO around our upcoming offerings designed to elevate their content strategy. And it worked! After seeing their Scribly Rewind, two clients booked calls to discuss upgrading their packages. 

Spotify Wrapped and the backlash against AI

It’s important to note that while Spotify Wrapped remains extremely popular — as we mentioned, Wrapped engaged 227 million monthly active users in 2023 — the campaign experienced significant backlash in 2024. 

Many users suspected that the platform was overly reliant on AI-generated content. They called out missing popular features and the uninspired design. This prompted an article in The New Yorker (The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped) and broader concerns about AI’s role in music curation. Spotify clarified that generative AI was not used for Wrapped’s data or design, but the sentiment that the 2024 offerings “were milquetoast at best” remained.

At Scribly, we are well aware of the dangers of overreliance on AI and how this can lead to generic, uninspired content. We never use AI to write copy. With users prioritizing authenticity more than ever, it’s crucial to show up as yourself, provide value, create real connections with your audience, and be unique to stand out in the market — and you can only achieve this with real, talented, human writers. 

Adapt and scale successful marketing opportunities with Scribly

Despite the 2024 backlash, Spotify Wrapped remains a cultural phenomenon and powerhouse in marketing, offering lots of lessons for small business owners — both us and you included.

If you’re ready for Scribly to apply best-in-class marketing techniques to your business, too, get in touch today.