Spotify Wrapped 2022 has officially arrived. Though other music services, including Apple Music and YouTube Music, now put together their own year-end retrospectives, Spotify’s personalized and interactive Wrapped experience for its users, creators and podcasters remains the one to beat. The secret to its ongoing success is how it goes beyond simply offering a summary of top songs or artists to also include fun, shareable elements for music and audio fans to explore, post to social media and compare with their friends.
The Wrapped experience has grown in popularity over the years. In 2017, some 30 million Spotify users accessed Wrapped; by last year, that figure had grown to more than 120 million. In addition, there were nearly 60 million shares of Wrapped stories and cards across social platforms in 2021.
Consumer interest in Wrapped isn’t just about the data itself but also the way that Spotify personalizes the data to its users and presents it in clever ways. Last year, for example, Wrapped included an “Audio Aura,” which showed listeners their top two “moods” based on their listening behavior.
This year, the new addition of note is something Spotify calls your “Listening Personality.”
Created with obvious inspiration from the classic Myers-Brigg personality test and its four-letter codes, the “Listening Personality” feature also introduces a four-letter combination for the user that translates into one of the 16 personality types Spotify has created. For instance, fans who quickly stream new releases and who are often ahead of trends might find themselves dubbed an ENPC, or an early adopter, while fans who love to stream music from other parts of the world might be labeled an ENLC, or a voyager.
“The way we listen to music says a lot about us and your Listening Personality not only tells you about the music you listen to but what that says about your music taste,” explains Spotify VP of Product Development Babar Zafar, who leads the team that creates the Wrapped experience.
People’s personality type will be based on a combination of the music they stream and a selection of specific traits — like their tendency to discover new music, the average age of the songs they listen to, the range of artists they listen to and how their listening resembles or differs from others. Each of the 16 possible Listening Personalities is given its own colorful card designed for re-sharing to social media or for messages to friends.
This new feature is being integrated with Snapchat, too, allowing fans to unlock a personalized Snapchat Lens that reflects their “Listening Personality.” Snapchat users can also take advantage of Wrapped-themed apparel for Bitmojis. And with a new GIPHY partnership, users can access custom Wrapped-themed GIFs.
Another Wrapped 2022 feature is something called “Audio Day,” which is an interactive story that describes an individual’s listening trends from morning through evening.
Meanwhile, Wrapped’s popular “Top Song” feature is being expanded this year to offer a few more insights, like how many times users listened to their top song and on which day of the year they listened the most.
Plus, users will receive their usual year-end updates about their top artists, songs, genres, podcasts and minutes listened as well as their Top Songs 2022 playlist.
Despite the many ways to share and interact with Wrapped, Spotify admits it can’t track the full reach of Wrapped as it notices its younger users will often snap a photo of their phone screen for private sharing, rather than — or in addition to — posting their Wrapped to social media.
To help address this, Spotify this year is now more deeply integrating with various messaging platforms as part of its drive to get Wrapped shared — and tracked — in as many places as possible. While users could always share Wrapped on social media, Wrapped 2022 is adding direct integrations with WhatsApp, Instagram Direct Messages, Facebook Messenger and Line, in order to better cater to those users who prefer to share their Wrapped more privately.
Spotify is also leveraging its more recent Roblox integration, Spotify Island, as part of this year’s Wrapped.
In its virtual world, Roblox users can go on Wrapped-inspired quests, play games, shop virtual merch and use a photo booth feature with 12 different artists, including Bizarrap, Black Sherif, CRO, Doechii, Eslabon Armado, Miranda Lambert, NIKI, Stray Kids, SUNMI and Tove Lo.
The company is also doubling down on another feature introduced last year: artist video messages.
Taking a cue from celeb social apps like Cameo and the popularity of short-form video, as on TikTok, Spotify last year had worked with 170+ artists to create short video messages where they thank fans for including them in their listening throughout the year. This year, the company expanded the video message feature, “Your Artist Messages,” to more than 40,000 music creators, including well-known names like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, J Balvin, Måneskin, Shania Twain, Pusha T and others.
Users can scroll through the video messages in a vertical, full-screen interface, similar to TikTok.
Spotify says users will see these videos if they have at least two artists with “thank you” videos in their top artists. In other words, the feature is limited to those fans who are most engaged with the artists. While the feature is sure to boost fan engagement, it’s a shame the artists can’t also post their videos somewhere else on Spotify — like a Stories section on their own Artist profile, for example. Spotify says users can see up to a maximum of 10 artists’ “thank yous” in Wrapped.
Wrapped will also get its own hub on Spotify’s mobile app, where streamers can browse merch and concert tickets from their top artists.
As in past years, creators and podcasters will have their own Wrapped experiences, available directly from Spotify for Artists, Spotify for Podcasters and Anchor. Artists will gain insight into their streams, their most-shared lyrics, how many fans had them in their top artists, fans’ Listening Personalities and more. Podcasters will gain insights on listens and follows, how many fans had their podcast in their top 5 or 10, their top episode overall, placement on the charts and more.
Of course, as part of Spotify’s year-end review, the company also highlighted the top artists and creators on its platform, both globally and on a per-country basis.
This year, the most-streamed artist globally was Bad Bunny, followed by Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd and BTS. The most-streamed songs globally were “As It Was” by Harry Styles, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals, “STAY (with Justin Bieber)” by The Kid LAROI, “Me Porto Bonito” by Bad Bunny featuring Chencho Corleone, and “Tití Me Preguntó” by Bad Bunny. And the most-streamed albums globally were “Un Verano Sin Ti” (Bad Bunny), “Harry’s House” (Harry Styles), “SOUR” (Olivia Rodrigo), “=” (Ed Sheeran) and “Planet Her” (Doja Cat).
In reference to Bad Bunny’s chart dominance — the artist is now the most-streamed globally for the third year in a row — Spotify points out that an average of 50% of users globally stream at least one Latin song per month on its service, equating to around 215 million users around the world. To celebrate, Spotify will turn its green heart to Bad Bunny’s red heart when users “like” a Bad Bunny track during the next week.
“You can see it’s far more than a genre. The average monthly streams of Latin music in 2022, so far, is over 24 billion streams,” said Spotify’s Global Head of Public Affa1irs Dustee Jenkins. “A massive number — and just in the U.S., 1 in 10 streams is Latin music,” she noted.
In the U.S., the most-streamed artists were led by Drake in first place, followed by Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Kanye West and The Weeknd. The top songs were “As It Was” by Harry Styles, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals, “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy, “Me Porto Bonito” by Bad Bunny featuring Chencho Corleone and “First Class” by Jack Harlow.
Top albums were “Un Verano Sin Ti” (Bad Bunny), “Harry’s House” (Harry Styles), “Dangerous: The Double Album” (Morgan Wallen), “Midnights” (Taylor Swift) and “SOUR” (Olivia Rodrigo).
Notably, Swift’s “Midnights” album only arrived last month and already broke numerous records, including becoming the most-streamed album in a single day. Not surprisingly then, Swift became 2022’s “most viral” artist globally, ahead of The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, BTS and Lana Del Rey, based on shares from Spotify to social platforms.
Spotify also highlighted its most popular podcasts for the year, which, globally, were led by “The Joe Rogan Experience” (again!), then “Call Her Daddy,” “Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain,” “Caso 63” (All Languages) and “Crime Junkie.” The U.S. list also saw Rogan and “Call Her Daddy” in the top two spots, followed by “Crime Junkie,” “The Daily” and “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard.”
And though a fairly new addition in the U.S., Spotify showcased its top audiobooks in a list that didn’t seem to include only current releases. Instead, users’ top books were “I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling, “It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson.
The company said it will also market Wrapped through out-of-home campaigns, including things like a word search that appears in billboards in LA and Brooklyn, and more. Spotify additionally partnered with FC Barcelona, which will result in 2022 Wrapped videos from players, including Robert Lewandowski, Alexia Putellas, Pedri and Ansu Fati, shared to social media.
Wrapped 2022 is available only through Spotify on mobile devices.
Spotify users have also been enjoying a third-party tool, Instafest, which also creates playlists based on users’ listening habits.
Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify
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