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SpotifyWrapped: Spotify Turned User Listening Stats to a Free Ad Campaign
- quyleanh 5y agoSpotify 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.
- emodendroket 5y agoDoubtful. Last.fm had that concept.
- quyleanh 5y agoI don't use Last.fm...
- emodendroket 5y agoBut we’re talking about “users,” not you specifically.
- aogaili 5y agoI personally enjoyed it, they were good stats and good marketing.
- karlshea 5y agoYes, 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".
- paulcole 5y agoIt 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.
- dymk 5y agoThats how people work. That’s not a particular HN “brand”.
- paulcole 5y agoYes, 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.”
- karlshea 5y agoI 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.
- paulcole 5y agoKinda. 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.
- CPLX 5y agoYes 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.
- fortran77 5y agoSpotify has every type of music!
- 1cvmask 5y agoI 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.
- soheilpro 5y agoI've copied the same model at https://volt.fm 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.
- dawnerd 5y agoJust signed up and really impressed so far. Nicely done!
- kennywinker 5y agoI'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
- Hasnep 5y agoLast.fm should let you collect statistics from most streaming services throughout the year.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoNot 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.