The Spotify Wrapped campaign has become one of the quintessential cultural milestones of the 2010s.
Since the annual marketing campaign’s inception in 2016, each progressive year has sparked more cultural debate, showcased a more impressive budget and produced more and more memes. The world stops and for one brief moment we all revel in our collective music tastes. Our timelines are inundated with year-end reviews from Spotify’s curated algorithms—people posting their year-end recap with a dash of irony, your friends unironically thinking they discovered artists you had been listening to for months or even celebrities using their Wrapped to prove to their audience that they are just like them.
There is no hiding from this campaign. Despite our attempts to start listening to “normal” music as the Wrapped date approaches, we are still greeted with an elaborate presentation of the unfiltered art we consumed this year, and we should embrace that.
The enduring appeal of the Spotify Wrapped campaign is what it achieves through a cross-section of data analytics and organic visual creativity. It’s a digestible and genuinely fun way to browse through podcasts, albums and playlists we consistently listened to throughout the year. Internationally, the most-streamed artists were Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd and BTS. The top songs of 2022 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 feat. Chencho Corleone and “Tití Me Preguntó” by Bad Bunny. The top global podcasts were The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain, Caso 63 (All Languages) and Crime Junkie. These are just the tip of the iceberg of trends gleaned from Spotify’s roughly 456 million users.
This campaign would be meaningless if it were not for the unique ways in which Spotify presented this listening data to its users. This year’s iteration of Spotify Wrapped introduced the new personalized listening personality and Audio Day features. The former is an offshoot of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (I got ENVC, one of the 16 personality types offered by Spotify) and the latter is an interactive story that shows how one’s music tastes shift over the course of a day (spoiler alert: it does not improve throughout the day). Additionally, dedicated fans were greeted with personalized messages from their most streamed artists, a program that was expanded to host roughly 40,000 musical creators.
Besides all of the zany and unique gadgets that this campaign offers, the enduring appeal of Spotify Wrapped lies in a more universal and humanistic allure: this campaign is a rare insight into ourselves. The art we consume day in and day out sheds light on how we truly act and view the world. From gloomcore to Reggaeton to trap music to Thrash metal, we process the world and soundtrack our days to make sense of time itself. We care deeply because we want to feel understood and connected to a larger human community.
Between the constant stream of bad news and foreboding geopolitical events, we continually find solace in music. The Spotify Wrapped campaign, which has been adapted to upwards of 70 languages internationally, does not have time to spare your feelings. It will show you how you listened in 2022, whether you are proud of it or not.
As Rasmus Wangelin, global head of brand design at Spotify, articulated in a recent interview, “There’s no hiding behind Wrapped. You’re gonna have to own it.”
We should take Wangelin’s advice to heart and embrace what we listened to this year. After all, what is the point of running away from ourselves?
