BENGALURU: If your social media feeds have been flooded by everyone’s Spotify wrapped updates, you aren’t alone. Between listeners posting with pride and musicians posting with humility, sharing your Spotify stats seem to have become an important part of pop culture. To the extent that it has made its way into memes and parodies - Zillow has one that is particularly amusing.
Apart from reaffirming the global dominance of Taylor Swift, it’s also interesting to see how Spotify has managed to turn personal music streaming back into a community experience. A big part of Spotify’s success has been a result of its data collection – by tracking which artistes you listen to, which songs you skip, what genres keep you going at which times of the day and using this information to predict what else you might like, it has managed to gain over 450 million subscribers.
How this music streaming service took data it was already collecting and turned it into insights worth sharing with the world is truly a masterclass in customer engagement. Presented as Data Stories, Spotify tells you several statistics about your listening habits:
The different genres you listen to (along with top genres), minutes you’ve listened (and how you’ve fared in comparison to other subscribers), your most played song, how many songs you listened to, your top 5 songs, top artistes, and how many artistes you listened to in total. It has then taken this data and created three unique, shareable, insights: your listening personality (one of sixteen types), your Audio Day (how your listening patterns vary over the course of a day) and your personal top 100 song playlist.
Younger listeners are all sharing their playlists, listener personalities, and if they were in the top listeners of a particular artiste. It’s also a good time for kids to demand their own Spotify account because family listening could skew the results, and there is nothing more embarrassing than a tween having to share that Cocomelon made it to the top 5 artistes of the year. This global engagement exercise just serves to reinforce Spotify’s brand as THE streaming service for the young audience.
For creators, the data includes the number of times their songs were streamed, the number of countries listeners are from and for how many listeners you are in the top artiste. It also shows if your number have gone up from the previous year. It has included a new feature of artiste messages, where artistes can engage with their listeners and thank them for listening. By making itself a part of the experience, in the middle of the relationship between the artiste and the listener, Spotify has ensured that it is much more than just a streaming service.