Spotify's 2022 Wrapped offers users recap of their listening habits this year

(Image Courtesy: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg)

As 2022 draws to a close, audio streaming service Spotify is providing users a peek into their listening habits through its annual Wrapped hub on the app.

While the initiative started as a marketing campaign for the company, Spotify Wrapped's personalised nature that provides users a retrospective look at their listening history over the past year through various data points across different formats, has also made it a cultural phenomenon with people sharing their own listening activity while artists share their yearly performance.

More importantly, since every feature in the entire experience is geared towards incentivising people to share these tidbits with their friends or on social media platforms, it also has become a key initiative for Spotify to acquire new users as well as drive usage among existing users.

The service also made the personalised Wrapped experience exclusive to its iOS and Android apps a few years back.

In a shareholder letter earlier this year, Spotify had stated that two of its personalised playlists - Your Top Songs and Your Artists Revealed - accounted for almost 8 percent of total consumption hours on the platform within 48 hours of the last year's campaign launch on December 1, 2021.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek also mentioned in February 2022 that the campaign was a significant driver for the growth of its monthly active user base in Q4 2021.

Sure enough, rivals such as YouTube Music and Apple Music have also subsequently replicated this initiative by providing their own year-in-review recaps to users, rather than offering a standard list of top songs or albums of the year.

New features

For this year's Wrapped hub, Spotify is introducing new elements and ways for users to discover their listening history over the past year.

A new feature called 'Your Listening Personality' will not only tell users about the music they listen to but what that says about their music taste, based on 16 different Spotify-created listening personality types, the company said. Another interactive feature called Audio Day will tell users how their music taste evolves throughout the day.

The service is adding the ability to share Wrapped cards on WhatsApp and Instagram as well as Wrapped-themed GIFs across GIPHY's partners. Listeners can also unlock a personalised Snapchat lens that reflects their listening personality along with Wrapped-themed apparel for Bitmojis (Snapchat's digital character avatars) anywhere they are available.

Spotify is also expanding a fan-related experience it introduced last year, where eligible users will be able to see a personalised video feed with thank you messages from some of their top artists in 2022, with each video followed up by their most listened song from that artist this year. The company claims that it will offer messages from over 40,000 artists including AR Rahman, Ritviz, Prateek Kuhad, Badshah, Shreya Ghoshal and Jonita Gandhi among others.

Besides, the 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 to 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 'Excuses' by artists AP Dhillon, Intense, and Gurinder Gill was the most streamed song in India this year with over 19 crore streams in 2022.

Late Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala's 'Moosetape' was the most streamed album by Spotify listeners in India, followed by the Hindi movie 'Shershaah', AP Dhillon’s album 'Hidden Gems', and Hindi movies 'Kabir Singh', and 'Brahmastra'.

In terms of podcasts, Leeza Mangaldas' 'The Sex Podcast' topped the charts followed by Mithilesh Patankar's 'The Mythpat Podcast' and Ranveer Allahbadia's 'The Ranveer Show'. Joe Rogan's 'The Joe Rogan Experience' and Jay Shetty's 'On Purpose with Jay Shetty' were the only two International podcasts that made it to the list of top 10 streamed podcasts in the country.