December brings candy canes, snow angels — and a reminder of just how much Lady Gaga you’ve listened to.
Spotify Wrapped, an annual walk down memory lane available to the streaming platform’s more than 713 million users, is now a hallmark for the company, flooding social feeds for one day every year and spawning copycats.
The project has grown rapidly; by the December launch date, Spotify is already working on next year’s Wrapped. What once took a handful now takes hundreds, from designers to engineers to data scientists.
The annual wrap-up has also evolved over the years, assessing new mediums — podcasts, now audiobooks — and adding new “stories,” Spotify’s term for its slides. Some stories have scored off the charts, like 2023’s Sound Towns, which told you which city shared your taste in music. Others, like last year’s Your Music Evolution, have drawn a more mixed reception.
But make no mistake, Spotify Wrapped is big business for the streamer. On the fourth-quarter earnings call, Spotify co-president Alex Norström said that it has “become a significant driver of our business,” engaging 245 million users in 2024.
Three Spotify leaders took Business Insider behind the scenes of the Wrapped process. It’s an ever-growing project, one built off thousands of Slack messages and conversations a year, the executives said.
“From a marketing perspective, this is the biggest thing we do every year,” said Matthew Luhks, Spotify’s senior director of global marketing. “It’s the thing that’s most looked forward to. It’s also the thing that gets the most scrutiny.”
Inside the Wrapped timeline
The minute Wrapped goes live, the Spotify team begins obsessively tracking social media.
Spotify immediately goes trend-hunting through the hashtags and replies, said Laura Kirkpatrick, Spotify’s senior director of channel marketing. (Her top artist of the year: Blood Orange.) The social team is one of the “tens of teams” inside Spotify that track reception across the globe.
“We’re talking about a massive footprint in the many, many hundreds, across the whole business, that are on standby that day,” she said.
Then begins the post-mortem, where Spotify employees across teams weed through what went right (or wrong) across each year’s Wrapped.
That includes last year, when feedback from Wrapped was unusually harsh. Users flooded the company’s social media profiles with negative comments, calling the year’s edition “boring” and “inaccurate.”
Luhks said that 2024 was a record-breaking year — 1 in 3 Spotify users engaged with Wrapped — but that feedback was mixed. Some users were disappointed, he said.
“We listened to what they were underwhelmed with, disappointed with, and we used that for fuel and for inspiration,” Luhks said.
Some users also critiqued 2024’s Wrapped for its use of generative AI. Stories included the Wrapped AI Podcast, powered by the buzzy Google NotebookLM. On the fourth-quarter earnings call, Spotify executives said that they came up with the feature six to eight weeks before Wrapped came out. That particular feature is not present in the 2025 edition.
“Every insight, every story, every design choice is made by real, very talented people at the company,” who would never “be comfortable letting machines do their work,” Luhks said.
After the post-mortem, the Spotify team starts to tinker, adjust, and ideate. That includes the data science team, which builds the algorithms that determine your top fives.
Building those lists can be more challenging than expected. “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes had a major resurgence this year thanks to a TikTok trend. If you streamed the song endlessly, should their 1992 album “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!” be in your top albums? Likely not.
The data scientists “construct the data” to make sure fans see themselves “mirrored back,” said Lauren Saunders, Spotify’s product director of personalization. (Top artist: Nirvana)
This year, Saunders’ team conducted a comprehensive review of the methodologies used for these classic rankings, including top songs and artists. They dug through piles of data points and sets before coming to the conclusion that the approach of years past was best.
“We really went deep, and we were like, ‘Actually, we have conviction,'” Saunders said.
Given Wrapped’s importance to the company, executives are involved throughout the process, Luhks said. (Top artist: Dean Blunt.) One new group-sharing feature, Wrapped Parties, helped bring senior leadership in.
“We then start putting our execs into Wrapped Parties together, and they can actually play and experience it,” Saunders said. “That’s always really fun.”
Getting users in-person, off-social, and away from competitors
As the scale of Wrapped grows, the way Spotify’s users share the info has also changed.
The recap became infamous for its shareable top fives, plastered across millions of Instagram Stories. Social media is less about posting these days. As the platforms move from “friends” to “followers,” Spotify has taken note.
“The biggest change we see is that there’s less mass sharing, broadcast sharing, and more small-group sharing,” Luhks said. The company creates moments for both wide audiences and group chats, he said.
What about the digital detoxers, ready to pick up a dumb phone or stuff their device in a Yondr pouch? Spotify is also pushing toward this crowd with 50 in-person pop-ups. Check the GIMS-themed parade of Green Ferraris in Paris, or the 800-foot cascade of red hair at New York’s Union Square subway stop honoring Chappell Roan.
The intention of these events is to “bring fans together” and honor “listening offline,” Kirkpatrick said.
By now, Spotify isn’t the only streamer in the game. Apple Music debuted its rival offering, Reply, on the web in 2019, and brought it to the mobile app five years later. Some users turn to more consistent recaps of their listening, like the Paramount Skydance-owned Last.fm.
But Spotify’s recap is likely the biggest — and helps fuel sign-ups. On the fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek said that Wrapped was a “huge driver behind our MAU and subscriber growth.” It boosted Q4 performance that year, as it always did, he said.
“We do see similar campaigns, but believe that there is only one Wrapped,” Luhks said. “Wrapped, we hope, sets the bar.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post How does your Spotify Wrapped get made? 3 Spotify leaders break down the yearlong process. appeared first on Business Insider.
