Every year, “Wrapped” is one of the highlights of the music year. It’s a feature offered by streaming platforms like Spotify, where users can see a personalized recap of their year in music, including their most-listened-to songs, artists, and genres. Over time, these recaps have become a well-oiled strategy, attracting millions of consumers. But how did it all begin? Who invented Spotify Wrapped?
We tell you a little-publicized story and take you behind the scenes of one of the most effective communication strategies of recent years.
Who invented the Spotify Wrapped? The origins of the concept.
In 2019, Spotify dominated the streaming market. The Swedish company benefits from a growing number of users and a modern image boosted by new technologies. But competition is raging. This was the case in the early days of music streaming when a few players tried to carve out a slice of an increasingly massive cake. But in 2019, it’s an all-out war. New players have entered the market and are gaining momentum. TIDAL has reshuffled the cards and symbolically shown that artist remuneration policies are insufficient. Having dominated the French market, Deezer is now trying to establish itself internationally. In addition to its major competitor, Apple Music, Spotify has Google and Amazon in its rearview mirror.
These tech behemoths are making ever greater efforts to establish themselves in the streaming world, along with YouTube Music and Amazon Music. For Spotify, there’s no doubt that these two platforms will come to the fore in the months or years. Their strength? They manage to couple their subscription offers in the business or technology fields with an advantageous music streaming subscription. In any business, the price argument is unbeatable, and Spotify knows it will have a hard time competing with them if they gain momentum one day.
From 2016 to 2019
The Swedish company is still at the top, but for how long will it stay? It is preparing massive investments in podcasts and audiobooks, but will this be enough? Spotify executives are aware they’ve succeeded in standing out from the crowd by staying almost systematically ahead of the trends. Before being duplicated by their competitors. So they need to create something. Something innovative, something that’s never been seen before. And one that will differentiate them and give them a significant competitive edge.
But it’s hard to invent new things when it seems that everything, or almost everything, has already been done. Spotify launched its first Wrapped three years ago, and its competitors followed suit. However, they want to go further so that the concept can gain momentum. They know that their Wrapped is as much a highlight as a moment when potentially every one of the company’s customers becomes a prescriber and advertises for Spotify without thinking about it. But something needs to be added: an option to make it even more impactful.
The miracle solution comes from a young woman, an intern at Spotify. In 2019, she will contribute to launching one of the most popular marketing operations of recent years.
Who invented the Spotify Wrapped? Meet Jewel Ham!
Note: This article was written after reading Jewel Ham’s extensive testimonials. At the end of this section, you’ll find Spotify’s point of view. The two differ; please keep this in mind when reading these paragraphs.
In 2019, artist Jewel Ham is interning with Spotify’s design team. Her contract lasts three months, during the summer. A relatively short period during which Spotify asks her to think about a format specially adapted to Gen-Z, based on Wrapped. At the age of 21, Jewel was studying at Howard University, renowned for the quality of its teaching. Jewel is an avid music lover, living in New York and walking long distances with her headphones screwed into her ears.
At the time, Spotify Wrapped was a simple link sent to users, allowing them to consult their year in review, accompanied by a playlist. The concept was innovative but didn’t benefit from any particular visual attention and needed to be shareable.
Jewel Ham is aware that Gen-Z needs graphic formats, both detailed and minimalist, that they’ll be proud to share. This is the age of Instagram and stories. It’s not sure this new generation will be proud to post their annual music recap if the format isn’t adapted. So they put together a presentation highlighting several story formats, with an image taking up a good part of the screen and a few lines of text. The whole thing is interactive, fun, and graphic, with pop colors and information stand out more. She also envisions Wrapped as an experience based on a sense of community, where each post featuring an element of a Wrapped would be individually shareable. In 2024, Spotify Wrapped is still based on this model, even if it has since largely evolved.
Differences of opinions on who invented Spotify Wrapped
As a Wrapped consumer, Jewel understood the tool’s value and managed to extract all its sap. She had always told herself that she wanted to find a way to share her tastes with those closest to her. Particularly interested in song lyrics, she likes to share her favorite lyrics, and Wrapped is a way of doing just that.
She posts her pitch on her X account:
For Working Not Working, she explains:
“I wanted to center on some of those and people interacting with them. So, it’s just a space for sharing. Sharing what music you’re into and sharing how it affects the mood—because the mood is what makes art. It’s what makes your day. It’s in everything, and that’s musically curated. So I wanted to play on the two.”
For the record, Jewel Ham made this presentation on the last day of her internship. Just in time! The Spotify employees appreciated the idea and validated Jewel’s efforts. After that, she left the company and has not heard from the project again.
In 2020, Spotify Wrapped underwent a complete redesign, incorporating the innovations proposed by Jewel Ham. She then took to social media to remind everyone that she was behind the concept, complaining that Spotify hadn’t credited her for her involvement. Her testimony was shared and picked up by the media, and the world went wild. Faced with the controversy, Spotify is forced to speak out.
A Spotify representative of Spotify, for the media outlet Refinery29 denies that the young artist is the only one behind the new Spotify Wrapped formats. So, as ever, there are two sides to the same story:
“Since Spotify’s Wrapped concept was first introduced in 2013, hundreds of employees have contributed ideas and creative concepts that have made the experience what it is today. While ideas generated during Spotify’s internship program have occasionally informed campaigns and products, based on our internal review, that is not the case here with Spotify Wrapped. It’s unfortunate that things have been characterized otherwise”.
Tens of millions of people now use Spotify Wrapped, and it has become a major event every year. While Spotify’s competitors have also launched their Récaps, few have created as much excitement as Wrapped.
And now that you know who invented Spotify Wrapped, how can Soundiiz help you make the most of it?
How can Soundiiz help you make the most of your Spotify Wrapped?
Even though we’re trying to improve our services daily, we’re not offering a recap of your streaming year for now. We’re concentrating on something else, namely improving your day-to-day use of Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, TIDAL, YouTube Music, Amazon Music and others. This has been our guiding principle since the beginning, and we’ve developed a number of tools to help us achieve it.
The one that should interest you most as part of the end-of-year Wrapped is our data transfer tool. Thanks to this technology, you can transfer all your streaming data from one platform to another in just a few minutes. Liked songs, playlists, saved albums, and more. It’s all transferable! Many people are using Soundiiz at the time of the Wrapped release. They want to test what the competition offers so that they can share their listening statistics with friends and family or with their social network followers the following year. Spotify’s Wrapped differs from Apple’s, Deezer’s, or YouTube Music’s recap. And you might just want to see if the grass is greener elsewhere! Our transfer function takes the load off your mind by transferring your data, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
And don’t panic if you’re worried about losing the content you used to listen to on your old streaming platform. Thanks to our Sync function, you can enjoy the best of both worlds. Life’s good, isn’t it?
Once you’ve used Soundiiz to switch from one platform to another, you can manage your library directly from your homepage. Soundiiz is an all-in-one tool!
