Spotify Wrapped 2023 dominates social media with its end of year recap

One of the world’s largest streaming platforms, Spotify, dominated social media for the past 24 hours, and counting, for its famous end of year Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped was initially launched in 2016 with the intent of creating a viral marketing campaign. Each year, the platform makes it easier for users to share their data on social media, leading to increased promotion on platforms and free advertisement for the app.

In 2019, Spotify’s head of marketing said that this feature creates the ‘FOMO’ effect (fear of missing out) leading new users to Spotify each year.

This feature exclusively appears towards the end of the year as a recap of what the user has been up to for the past 365 days. The viral feature showcases the user’s top-listened-to artists, albums, songs, podcasts, genres, and the frequency of use.

Additionally, Spotify adds a new tab showcasing the user’s top played songs gathered in a playlist, along with 2023’s top artists, tracks, groups, throwbacks, and others, based on all of its users’ preferences.

Furthermore, this year, Spotify added an interesting feature for its end-of-year festivities called ‘In Memoriam 2023’. With this new feature, Spotify created playlists from loved artist who have departed in 2023. This includes Tina Turner, Jimmy Buffett, Sinéad O’Connor, and Tony Bennett among others.

Another new feature is ‘Sound Town’ that matches the user’s most listened to songs and artists to a city location whose population is most likely to share similar music tastes.

This follows the new ‘Me in 2023’ feature that shows users what type of user they are. Spotify has created a total of 12 characters specifically for this feature. For instance, if a user creates a lot of different playlists, they are given the alchemist character. On the other hand, those who listened to old songs on repeat are given the Time Traveler character.

Artists also collaborated with the streaming giant to surprise their fans with personalised videos for their top listeners. This year big artists such as Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma and Dolly Parton joined this initiative.