This week Spotify dominated the chat groups around the world. The reason? Spotify Wrapped. This brilliant feature is an interactive summary of your year in music. It highlights what you listened to, for how long, where they are from, and even which town in the world listened to the most similar music to you! In all of my chat groups people were sharing their summaries, like the one you see above, comparing themselves to others and having fun. It’s a brilliant feature, and reminded me a lot of the book “Hooked” by Nir Eyal.
In the book, Mr. Eyal introduces the Hook Model,’ a four-step process that companies use to build customer habits. The four steps are:
- Trigger: These are cues that prompt users to take action. They can be external (like an app notification) or internal (a feeling or thought).
- Action: This is the behavior done in anticipation of a reward. Eyal argues that making this action as simple as possible increases the likelihood of it being performed.
- Variable Reward: This step involves providing rewards that satisfy the users’ needs but also have enough variability to keep the engagement interesting.
- Investment: This phase is where the user puts something into the product, like time, data, effort, social capital, or money, which makes them more likely to use it again.
Spotify Wrapped brilliantly leverages all of these steps, and in my view, leans heavily into the most important one – Investment. Briefly, the end of the year acts as the trigger, users know it’s coming and look forward to seeing their summary. It comes out at the beginning of December so Christmas Music doesn’t throw off the summary. It’s incredibly easy to use Spotify Wrapped – it’s just a click away – so users don’t have to perform many actions to get there. It’s automatically created over the year as well, you don’t have to sign up for it. They built in some distribution hacks so users want to share it as well. The variable rewards are the insights you gain into your habits. “How have I changed from last year?” “How do I stack up against my friends?” “OMG we have the same wrapped!” And finally Spotify Wrapped creates a powerful motive to invest more in Spotify in the next coming year. Users want to get their numbers up. They might want to listen to different music, to appear a different way. Maybe they want to be trendier, or more mature. Whatever the case, the feature manipulates users into wanting to spend more time on Spotify. It’s brilliant.
Finally, it’s a bit scary as well. I am surprised there isn’t more backlash against Spotify Wrapped. I have one friend at Facebook who quipped that if Facebook did a similar feature for their users it would be 1984 all over again. Users would be livid, and congress would come knocking. The fact Spotify has managed to side step this while creating an intimate user profile about every single one of their users, and then getting their users to share it with everyone else is amazing. It’s likely a testament to the power of music. We aren’t as protective over what we listen to, even if it tells others a lot about us.