Pretty much every app on our phone and brand we buy from tracks our digital behavior but most people are not always comfortable with this and tend to be hesitant when it comes to sharing their privacy and data. Music is the exception to this apparently. Since 2015, Spotify has figured out how to make data tracking so entertaining and interesting that it encourages users to willingly post their personal data on social media annually. Spotify Wrapped tracks what artists and songs users have been listening to the most for that year and then provides a yearly recap report with fun fonts and in postable format. It is unique to Spotify as other music streaming services, besides Youtube Music, do not seem to track this data or provide users with their findings. Like Apple music, since Apple heavily relies on the trust they have gained by their users for respecting their data privacy. Spotify Wrapped has become a normalized and social form of data tracking and this is providing hope for marketers and data analysts since cookies are going away soon, which has been the main data tracking tool relied on by the marketing industry for years. Even before the Spotify Wrapped Release, Spotify has always used data tracking to their advantage to ultimately help set them apart from other music streaming platforms which can be seen by their Discover page. Spotify is known for offering or creating playlists that contain songs or artists that the user would statistically be interested in based on their data history.
However, as fun and effective as this feature is, all data tracking comes with drawbacks. For one, users have realized that the music they listen to the month before the report is released tends to play more of a factor in some of the statistics than the music they listen to the rest of the year and may not represent your actual favorite artists or songs. So, if you randomly start listening to a new artist or band someone recommended to you in November, your data might be inaccurate. It is also a little odd how the report is released at the beginning of December rather than the end so the data is actually representing 11 months of the current year plus the December from the year before. No matter how cool or personalized these data suggestions seem to be, an AI cannot achieve a person’s preferences with 100% accuracy because it only knows you based on your data history which if you read our other articles, this may not always None of these points really matter though because Spotify Wrapped has proved year after year that if you make data tracking entertaining enough, people will actually enjoy it and it may even be inspiration for the next form of “Cookies”.
Sources
Pau, Kelly. “Spotify Wrapped, Unwrapped.” Vox, Vox, 2 Dec. 2021, https://www.vox.com/culture/22814121/spotify-wrapped-2021-algorithm-data-privacy.
