If you walked about USC’s campus today, you probably heard someone say “show me your Spotify Wrapped.” If you didn’t hear that, you’ve probably clicked through countless Instagram or Snapchat stories of people’s top artists and songs.
That’s right, Spotify is back for the seventh year of its annual personalized data set dubbed Spotify Wrapped, revealing users’ top artists, songs, podcasts and minutes spent listening.
Junior accounting major Chloe Benitez said she was “super excited” to see her Wrapped when she woke up Wednesday morning.
“The first thing I did was text my friends to have them send me what they had,” said Benitez.
Jeremy Gruber, a digital marketing expert and adjunct professor of music industry in USC’s Thornton School of Music, applauded the company for the concept.
“When it was invented a few years ago for the first time, it was a genius marketing campaign by Spotify,” said Gruber. “I think it’s really, really smart that they offered a way for fans and artists to engage and share their passion for music.”
One way that Spotify’s 574 million yearly users can engage with each other is through a new slide introduced this year called “Sound Town” which shows each user which city in the world had the most similar listening habits to them.
Junior accounting major Elle Tonnu, who listened to 37,000 minutes this year, got San Luis Obispo, California, as her town — somewhere she has never been. At least, not yet.
“Maybe I’ll visit and make friends and we can listen to music together,” said Tonnu.
A few of Tonnu’s and Benitez’s top artists included The Strokes, Harry Styles and Coldplay. Spotify users can engage with their favorite artists through a personalized “thank you” video message created by artists for their top fans. More than 40,000 artists uploaded videos this year, according to Spotify.
Features like the artist thank-you videos and Sound Town are nice for users, but Gruber, who works with artists who have music on Spotify, warned against the idea that these were just for the benefit of listeners.
“That’s a nice thing to do on its face, but Spotify doesn’t pay artists, Spotify pays rights holders,” said Gruber.
This means Spotify pays record labels and publishers who have relationships with the artists. For this reason, Gruber said it’s likely that Spotify will benefit more from something like the artist thank-you videos than the actual artists themselves.
Tonnu said her favorite part of Wrapped is finding new artists to listen to.
“It’s just fun to see what your friends are listening to and then hop on to what they’re listening to and compare your styles with each other,” said Tonnu.