SpotifyWrapped: Spotify Turned User Listening Stats to a Free Ad Campaign | Hacker News Reader

SpotifyWrapped: Spotify Turned User Listening Stats to a Free Ad Campaign

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37 pointsbluemoon201023 comments

Yes, it's fun. Mostly because it didn't start as an ad campaign, and it still doesn't feel like an ad campaign. During the first couple the only way to share your songs/artists/results was to take a screenshot.

Imagine, they made something cool aimed at their users and the users wanted to talk about it! That's the lesson that should be learned here, not "how do we fool our users into talking about our product for free".

It was 100% content marketing from the start. It’s just been wildly successful beyond what they imagined. There’s nothing wrong with marketing and advertising!

Your comment is very on brand for HN. By which I mean if there’s an ad you like it magically doesn’t feel like an ad campaign. But if you don’t like the ad, you better believe it feels like an ad campaign.

Thats how people work. That’s not a particular HN “brand”.

Yes, except I think the average person isn’t quite so aggressively proud of their dislike of advertising as the average HN commenter.

I’ll never cease to be amazed by the number of people commenting on the content marketing project of a VC firm that “ads never work on me.”

I mean if you go with that take literally everything anyone creates for any reason is content marketing. A novel? Content marketing for the author. A painting? Content marketing for the artist.

Of course the version that exists today is content marketing, but if that's what their goal was from the very first one it was very incompetently done. You really can't imagine some of their designers and engineers just wanted something cool at the end of the year they could do with all their data?

It's like saying Strava Heatmaps were "100% content marketing from the start". Sure, they're making money from them now, but that take is pretty cynical.

And I don't mind well-done ad campaigns, I have tickets to watch the British Arrows awards in a theater on Saturday.

Kinda. Content marketing has a pretty broad definition. But a book author’s core business tends to be books, and a painter’s work tends to be paintings. But Spotify’s core business isn’t infographics about how much music I listened to. That’s about the line for me.

> if that's what their goal was from the very first one it was very incompetently done

Not surprising. Most people aren’t great at most things, particularly the first time they try them.

> You really can't imagine some of their designers and engineers just wanted something cool at the end of the year they could do with all their data

Of course I can imagine this! But that doesn’t change what it fundamentally is once it’s available to the public. You can make something and not understand what it is — determining whether it’s through accidental or willful ignorance is an exercise for the reader.

Spotify charges it's artists to run ad campaigns... So that later in the year they'll have good stats on spotify wrapped.

It would be far too convenient for them to limit the outreach of artist based on the normal merits of their music, so this makes them lots of money on both ends, and then artists desperate to project symbols of success, eagerly participate in the popularity chase... This is what it's all come to, while artists rarely break even because of the ad spending they have to do to be notable on spotify.

Perhaps it will just wait another year to all implode, maybe not, either way the smart ones stay out of the gambling addiction schemes and just work on making music first.

I don't understand what you mean. I wouldn't imagine being featured on Spotify Wrapped is a goal for artists in and of itself. It's just a by-product of the fact that they had a lot of listeners. I can understand the frustration with having to run ad campaigns to get meaningful amounts of listeners, but how does Spotify Wrapped tie into that point?

If artists pay the ~$250+ fee to promote their music (based on the last time I checked), and then only make $50 for streaming their music 100k times, it's a heist plain and simply. If at the end of the year artists then publicize that they've had 100k streams, but in reality they only made $50 after spending $250 to get there then Spotify wrapped is quite possibly just a branding scheme to drive up their "under the table" annual ad revenue, and it encourages the platform to hold back non-ad-buying artists (in numerous ways) to encourage them to buy ad/promo/boost/playlist services.

This is the honest truth after my research over 3 years. There are several far more rewarding platforms out there that don't deal in phony merit badges, and that don't artificially bend reality to serve their profit records and shareholders first.

I agree with this statement; it's one of their business models, after all.

I've copied the same model at https://volt.fm and it's been amazingly effective.

I let users generate nice images from their top artists and songs for sharing on social media. And every time some big account on Twitter uses that to share their stats, it goes viral and brings in a lot of new users. In one occasion I had 24k new users in just two days.

Just signed up and really impressed so far. Nicely done!

Yes and Pink Floyd turned functional T-shirts into a free ad campaign.

It’s popular music. People love music and want to share their experience and affiliation with others. Which is kind of the point of popular music.

Spotify has every type of music!

I'm not sure why other streaming services don't copy this. Like, yeah, it'll obviously be a knockoff, but I only feel left out that I can't see/post my stats - not that it doesn't match everybody else's. I've used spotify, apple music, and now Tidal, and none of them have anything similar

Last.fm should let you collect statistics from most streaming services throughout the year.

I personally enjoyed it, they were good stats and good marketing.

Spotify users like kid, they put thing to a secrete saving box daily without notice. When the end of the year comes, their parent shows this box and they excite to open it with joys. Just to see what they have saved for year with a happy smiling face. I've experienced it for years with Spotify.

If Spotify allows user check and see their listening graph, there will be no successful thing like Wrapped.

Doubtful. Last.fm had that concept.

I don't use Last.fm...

But we’re talking about “users,” not you specifically.

I think these are great examples of voluntary "advertising" yourself and inadvertently the brand. I remember coming across examples where even school children would get sucked into competitions for drawings that included implicit brand advertising.

Not that interesting. Not only is this not new (3-4 years of pretty widespread exposure) but being so mainstream of course it's widely understood as a marketing play.

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