Spotify Wrapped Season—Once Again
The CRM campaign to end all CRM campaigns has arrived once again with more you for you.
Good morning.
The past few newsletters have gotten a bit more ponderous than usual so I’m going to rein it in a bit this week. Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of amorphous blogs about intangible feelings coming up in the future.
There are a lot of media stories to dissect from the past few weeks and I’ll be taking a look at those in more of a roundup format coming up as we look at where the trends for 2023 are landing as we round the corner into 2024.
But today it feels only right to talk about Spotify Wrapped.
I was returning home after traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday and I felt the urge. Maybe you did too. I Googled “When is Spotify Wrapped 2023?” And I was told when Spotify Wrapped usually drops: December 1st or December 2nd, but that in 2022, Spotify Wrapped dropped on November 30th. And then, lo and behold, on November 29th, Spotify Wrapped 2023 arrived!
We all know what Spotify Wrapped is now. And, as I mentioned, they have managed to create a yearly moment in the fractured pop culture landscape we have today. You can feel it coming in the air. That’s kind of amazing for a company that doesn’t make money and is in a fairly precarious, though perhaps improving, financial state.
Spotify Wrapped is a glorified CRM program or campaign. CRM, for those that don’t know, means customer relationship management. There are lots of ways to define what a CRM team does or doesn’t do and what their success metrics look like but at the end of the day the goal is to make customers happy in order to retain those customers in order to generate more recurring revenue and drive higher lifetime value from customers (LTV).
Maybe someone would describe it differently but that’s how I describe it. And that’s what Spotify Wrapped is. There is something simple and joyful about Spotify Wrapped. Running through their cheesy slideshow gives you an endorphin boost. We like sharing the results of our listening habits either out of pride in our taste or out of some kind of pride in the embarrassment of our guilty pleasures.
You get to see all the stuff you listened to broken down in hard data. You get to have an app tell you about you and your personality. And if we are looking for anything in life, it's for someone or something to tell us, assuredly, more about who we are.
And Spotify gets to take over the internet for at least one day, which is no small feat. People share their results and talk about them. Or, like this year, wonder why their “Sound Town” based on their music tastes is Burlington, Vermont. It also helps people forget about all the bad things Spotify does and engage with the product in a positive way. It may be the thing (as small as it might seem) that keeps them from unsubscribing or reminds them of the value of their subscription.
This year, though, despite my anticipation, it all felt a little hollow. I left asking “is that all there is?”
I don’t want to downplay Wrapped. This isn’t a piece to say, “Wrapped is great, but…” So many other brands have tried, unsuccessfully, to find their Spotify Wrapped. What they do is amazing and why should I expect anything more from it other than what it is? Maybe I’m just predictable. I know year after year I’m going to listen to a lot of Beatles and Wings and too many hours of The Rewatchables podcast. (Though I was happy to see Margo Price and Jenny Lewis in my top 5.)
I poked around at all of the “non-me” related Spotify Wrapped content they now offer in their Wrapped hub. There are now messages from “your favorite artists” (they had those last year); there are “best of” lists—like at any good cultural publication—in playlist form (those existed before); there are curated carousels like “Women Carried the Economy” with associated playlists and albums (new this year I think); there are also curated playlists by very specific genres and themes like “Indie that hit different in 2023” or “Shoegaze now” (new this year I think).
And poking around at all that content I thought: My god, there is just so much. Part of Spotify’s appeal has been its endlessness. There are new indie artists with new albums every week, overlooked gems, pop and rap artists to learn about so you can understand what anyone is ever talking about, whole genres you feel you are finally ready to “get into.” You can spend your whole life on Spotify and never touch the bottom.
That is exciting (and daunting) for a passive consumer or listener, but I imagine it is terrifying for an artist trying to stand out. Mainly because there are guys like me who are content to listen to the same Wings and Beatles songs year after year.
I even tried out DJ: Wrapped. Spotify has this new AI DJ feature that I’ve barely been aware of. The AI’s name is DJ X and he is voiced by an actual person named Xavier Jernigan. I fired DJ X up and heard him tell me about how he was going to do something a little bit different since its Spotify Wrapped season. He wasn’t going to show me anything new, he was going to explore some of my favorites from the year. I nodded along because it did make sense with the intent of the CRM program’s purpose—to remind you of what you liked and that you liked and listened to it on Spotify.
DJ X sounded like a regular ol’ disc jockey on any radio station you could stumble across on the dial. Though his offer was tempting, I had to decline. (No offense to Xavier.) I didn’t need an AI DJ, even if voiced by a real person, reminding me more about the music I love. It’s the end of the year and, like Springsteen, maybe I’m just a bit tired and bored with myself.
Or maybe there’s only so much a CRM program from a subscription service—even the best there is out there—can do to fill us up.