Spotify Wrapped season is here. For the 10th year, the market-leading audio streamer has dispatched its annual summaries of individual listening trends to users knowing they will share them online.
Sometimes “jumping into your world of audio”, as Spotify puts it, can raise a doubtful eyebrow. Is your “sound town” — the town in the world with the most similar musical taste to you, a feature of last year’s Wrapped — really Brighton? What does it mean to be in the top 5 per cent of Clairo listeners? Why is Sunny Goodge Street by Donovan somehow in your 100 most-streamed songs every year? All the big questions.
But this year has brought more certainty than most. Since April’s release of her album The Tortured Poets Department, there was only going to be one global winner in the top artists stakes: Taylor Swift.
Following up the drop of the original five-star album with an extra 15 songs on the “anthology” version just two hours later was a strategy designed to maximise streams. It worked, partly because it took so long to listen to them all and partly because it meant even fans who pre-ordered physical copies would be streaming the new songs too.
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On April 19th, the album became the first in the Swedish-founded platform’s history to rack up more than 300 million streams in a single day. For the second year in a row, Swift has now been named Spotify’s most-played artist, with more than 26.6 billion streams across the year as a whole.
As well as claiming the number one album, Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) record was in sixth place in the rankings — a notable feat for a 2023 re-release of an album originally sent out into the world in 2014.
Having once maintained a three-year boycott of Spotify in protest at paltry royalty rates – a stance that inflated CD sales of 1989 on its first outing – Swift is now busy working the streamer and its rivals to her advantage.
Both the boycott era and the embrace era point to a high level of marketing savvy. Indeed, there are two promotion geniuses at play here: Swift and whoever it was who came up with Spotify Wrapped.
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