If you’ve spent even a few minutes this week scrolling through your social feeds, you’ve undoubtedly seen people sharing screenshots of their year—and decade—in review as it pertains to their Spotify listening habits.
Spotify, the global music streaming giant, provides each of its users with a data-driven retrospective of the artists, songs, and even podcasts that have defined their year, called Spotify Wrapped. It’s comprised of a series of highly shareable and interactive visuals outlining less thought about aspects of music consumption as well, like which countries your most listened to artists hail from, how your listening habits changed with the seasons, and which genres dominated your personal play count.
The result was a week of social media platforms being dominated by people expressing their love of Spotify, and providing the company with a flood of free content marketing! And whether aware of it or not, Spotify made appeals to Levels 4, 5, 6, and The Seventh Level of engagement in doing so! (Need a quick refresher on The Seventh Level Engagement Framework, and what each of its levels looks like? Check out this post!)
- Level 4: Spotify tells you which artist was your most-listened-to in 2019, then prompts you to share that fact on social, tagging that artist to thank them. This is a basic Level 4 appeal: a low barrier-to-entry ask to engage.
- Level 5: It wasn’t just your friends and family members sharing their year end lists! Influencers and celebrities did as well, which prompted their fans to share their own. It wasn’t a sweepstakes in the conventional sense, but inspired by influential people, every day users shared their Wrapped playlists, incentivized by the potential for likes and interaction with their posts. Artists themselves are essential to the Wrapped experience, as they are presented with a special version of a year-in-review, which they can also share. In doing so, artists share with their fans that they appreciate their support, and encourage them to continue listening into the new year. This provides a natural pathway to Level 6 engagement.
- Level 6: By touting the potential for musical discovery and highlighting total time spent listening to Spotify, the company inspired users to take their listening a step further in 2020, to listen to even more of their favorite artists, and uncover new ones they’ll love. Users might not be fully engaged with Spotify the brand, but they are surely loving the service it provides, and how it connects them to the music they are fully engaged with.
- The Seventh Level: Spotify’s Seventh Level Statement would probably center around its desire to encourage exploration of new music, and self-expression through the music individual users love. Spotify Wrapped allows Spotify users to embody those values, and share them themselves. In the process, Spotify fans are brought into the fold of a larger community of music lovers.
