Spotify – 2021 Wrapped
SPOTIFY WRAPPED
Spotify Wrapped is our annual global program focused on celebrating the listening habits of our worldwide community through unique and shareable data stories.
Released annually in early December since 2016, the campaign allows Spotify users to view a compilation of data about their activity on the platform over the past year.
This case study is a continuation of the 2020 Wrapped case study.
This year, unlike any other, the internet was abuzz with anticipation much earlier
For this year’s Wrapped, our working relationship with Brand & Creative and Marketing started off solid after 2 campaigns together (2020 Wrapped and Only You). We took learnings from both campaigns, and applied them here to make it the best Wrapped yet.
These were our key focus areas to improve the experience:
Reimagined entry points
New ambitious data stories
Integrated sharing
Wrapped with others
Accessibility improvements
Reflect who we are as a brand
Reflect the year in culture
authentically
Before we dive into how we tackled these focus areas, let’s set the stage with this years theme.
In 2021, there wasn’t one normal. There were many normals. Lots of them. Yours. Mine. And hundreds of millions of listeners on Spotify. Wrapped was a chance to celebrate all of them. Because in Wrapped, normal is whatever you listen to, however you listen to it. So while 2021 was wildly different for each of us, there’s one thing we can collectively say; 2021 Wrapped was the soundtrack to the new normals.
The Design System
The hero graphic element for 2021 Wrapped is a dynamic thread, tying together the marketing creative. With an eye-catching color palette, and a graphic use of Circular type, the design system for this year’s Wrapped created by Brand & Creative is unexpected and fresh.
Toolkit
Focused Content
Typography
Ribbon
Colour Palette
Icons
Toolkit in Use
The In App Experience
In 2020 Wrapped, we learned that many eligible users didn’t know Wrapped was happening. So in 2021, we wanted to make it easier users to discover Wrapped by creating more persistent and contextual on-platform entry points. First, we have our new home entrypoint which makes it clear from using our clips component that users will be entering their stories experience.
We also introduced new re-engagement components on the Wrapped shelf on home and the Top Songs 2021 playlist. The shelf component adds a personalized touch, featuring your top artist from the year, and allows you to replay your Wrapped as many times as you like.
In 2021 Wrapped we provided more meaningful narratives about our user’s year beyond their quantitative music and podcast data. We did so by adding some non-traditional and culturally relevant data stories into the mix. One of these stories is called 2021 The Movie, which creates a cinematic snapshot of your year by pairing recognizable songs against key moments/scenes.
Another new story was Audio Aura, which provided a brand new, genreless perspective on your year. In order to bring this magical story to life, we partnered with PZN to leverage our “mood” dataset for the first time and Mystic Michaela – a professional aura reader well known for her social presence and podcast. We were excited to see how listeners reacted to our blend of data and whimsy to create these beautiful outputs based on their top moods from the year.
We worked towards a new way to share amongst some familiar favorites. The team partnered with TikTok to build a brand new sharing integration just for Wrapped, which would enable users & artists to share their Wrapped Data Stories directly from the Spotify mobile app to TikTok.
Lastly, I want to highlight some small but mighty steps we’ve taken towards making Wrapped more enjoyable for all. This year the team worked with our Accessibility team to improve our data stories container, and make it easier and more pleasant to experience for those who have native Accessibility features turned on on their devices.
Updated features include:
Story auto-progression is disabled
Improved Voice Over labels
Larger UI elements to increase the tap space
Addition of back and next buttons
After surveying our users during this year’s Wrapper we’re looking ahead to the future, and already narrowing down on some key learnings from them:
Focus. on more detailed data and stats, as well as creative stories about behavior / mood
Facilitate content discovery
Foster existing and new connections
Make it easier for them to compare how they listen with other listeners
2021 Wrapped was our biggest yet, up 31% of engagement from 2020. Engagement remained sustained well after launch, thanks to the new entry points we included into the user flow.
2021 Wrapped broke records with 120+ million users engaging this year, and again took the internet by storm making it the main topic of conversation for days after launch.
Check out my 2021 Wrapped
to see all stories
Marketing Campaign
The following was created my the Brand & Creative team.
CREDIT
Sr Design Manager: Ronald Ruiz
Senior Designer: Cait Chargina
Product Manager: Leila Siddique
Engineering Manager: Udaya Pillalamarri
iOS Engineering: Glizela Taino, Maria Candelas Arroyo
Android Engineering: Yoki Lam, Juan Rivero
Backend Engineering: Michael Smith, Fred Wang
Agency: Spotify In-House
Design Director: Ellen Pai
Design Team: Angeline Toh, Josephine Tan, April Pascua, Rainy Fu, William Oswin, Shivani Parasnis
Collabrators: Dan Brill, Alexander Bodman, Oriel Davis-Lyons, Carolina PErez-Siam, Dominique Wynne, Edward Yeung, Kate Carter, Jill Menor, Colette McIntyre, Chris Monk, Alexandra Tanguay, Lauren Solomon, Christine Andren, Christine Match, Mel Eisen, Ang Gonzales, Claire Ulak, Zach Pentel, Nate Doiev, Chris Lubin, Neal Gorevic, Nienke Dettmeijer, Louisa Ferguson + more