Spotify's 2021 Wrapped gives users a peek into their listening habits this year

As 2021 draws to a close, Spotify is launching its annual Wrapped hub on the app that will tell users what songs, artistes, genres, and podcasts they listened to during the year.

While the initiative started as a marketing campaign for the Swedish audio streaming service, it has garnered an almost cult following among consumers in recent years. This is because of its personalised nature that provides insights to users on their own listening activity, rather than offering standard top songs or albums of the year.

More importantly, every feature in the entire experience is geared towards incentivising people to share these tidbits with their friends or on social media platforms. Sure enough, it dominates the social feeds for several days with people sharing their own listening activity while artists share their yearly performance.

"Humans love nostalgia. They love to go back in their history and see what were the amazing things that have happened this year or revisit their sad times to compare how is today better than yesterday. When I get to know what was my favourite song this year, it tells a lot about my mood this year" said Himanshu Khanna, founder of Sparklin, a digital strategy & design company.

"Humans might not enjoy Maths but they love stats! They tell you essentials on how you are progressing in your life. For instance, even though we eat so much from food delivery firms, they hardly ever tell you how many times you have had a specific dish. Similarly, there are too many things in life where we can't keep a score. Even if you have some sense of things, the idea you have and the reality are far apart in most of the cases" said Khanna, who has also founded Openvy, a new-age people-first digital network.

That said, Spotify also releases the traditional list of most-streamed songs, albums, podcasts and artists on its platform. Since last year, Spotify also made the personalised Wrapped experience exclusive to its iOS and Android apps.

New features

For this year's Wrapped, the firm has introduced several new elements that give users a deeper look into their listening habits. This includes an interactive data-based game called 'Playing Cards', Audio Aura visualisations and '2021: The Movie'.

Playing Cards is inspired by the popular party game 'Two Truths and a Lie', wherein the service would display several statements to users based on their listening activity this year and users will have to guess which statements are true.

Meanwhile, '2021: The Movie' features the user's top songs in a cinematic fashion while Audio Aura visualises the user's top two music moods.

Spotify said users will also be able to see how their music taste in 2021 matches up with their friends using the new Blend feature and stream the blended playlist or share it on social platforms.

Introduced in September 2021, Blend allows two users to generate a shared playlist that merges their music tastes and changes on a daily basis based on the listening habits of both the users.

The service will also have a fan-related experience wherein Spotify will show users thank you videos from one of more than 170 artists and creators if a song by one of these participating artists is present in the user's “Your Top Songs 2021” or “Your Artists Revealed” playlists.

Apart from this, the 2021 Wrapped hub will feature personalised music and podcast playlists on the user's top songs and artists along with playlists that feature music from global and domestic top artists, top podcast episodes throughout the year and new podcasts from emerging creators.

What people are listening on Spotify in India?

Spotify also shared some India listening trends for the year. Arijit Singh continues to be the most streamed artist in India this year while 'Raataan Lambiyan' from the movie 'Shershaah' was the most streamed song in India this year.

'Shershaah' was also the most-streamed album of the year followed by 'Kabir Singh' and 'Moosetape', an album by Punjabi artist Sidhu Moosewala. Spotify noted that three of the K-pop boy band BTS found their place on the list of top 10 albums in the country.

The list of most popular podcasts in the country was also dominated by local original titles with 'The Mythpat Podcast' from gaming content creator Mithilesh Patankar topping the charts followed by Ranveer Allahbadia's 'The Ranveer Show' and 'The Stories of Mahabharata' by Sudipta Bhawmik.

'Naallanaa Murukku - The RJ Balaji Podcast' from RJ Balaji and 'Srimad Bhagavad-Gita Adhyaya 1' from audio and podcast network Aawaz also made it to the list.