It’s another outstanding year for one of the best marketing strategies of the decade. Spotify Wrapped is back, although you’ve probably been bombarded with enough Instagram stories to know. The streaming giants have been finding ways to make their annual review more exciting. Every year, we get a couple of new features that help you understand more about your listening habits and share them with your friends.

However, Spotify’s outdone themselves this year with the creativity of their ad-ons. Let’s check out the new Sound Town and Me in 2023 features. While we’re at it, let’s recap what Wrapped is all about and see which artists ended the year on top.

Spotify Wrapped Features We Know and Love 

Top Songs 

The first thing you see on the Spotify Wrapped story bubble is the Top Songs reminder. You can take a trip down memory lane with the songs you played the most all year. You get a host of features for the number one most played track, like the number of times played and the minutes spent listening to it. In the bubble itself, you can see your top 5, but there’s an option to download a much larger playlist. In 2023, you can click a popup from the slide itself and download a ranked, top 100 playlist of your most played songs of the year.

Top Artists

Just like your top songs, you get a list of your top 5 artists. You can go into how much time you spent listening to each artist and which months of the year you raved over them most. This is one of those brilliant features the streaming service added to make Wrapped a social media phenomenon. People love sharing their top artists more than anything else. You’re way less likely to run into someone who has the same most-played song of the year. However, people online can easily find listeners who share their passion. It’s a way to show support to your heroes and claim yourself to be an elite, transcended fan.

Your Library

By now, you’ve probably realized why Spotify Wrapped is so famous. It makes people feel important. If you’re top songs and artists weren’t enough, Your Library really drives home the concept of you being the center of attention. It’s a comprehensive overview of your musical palette. From favorite artists to genres, you can explore your musical journey throughout the year. Hearing some of those songs play in the background as you go through the slides makes the experience pretty nostalgic too.

One of the underlying benefits of Spotify is that they can highlight the underlying message of their service. They want to represent all kinds of music from all over the world. They show you the diversity in your own taste and reinforce their commitment to cataloging everything the world has to offer. It even doubles as an educational opportunity for their users. Many listeners unknowingly develop a taste for a genre through Discover Weekly and other mixes. With Wrapped, they can learn a bit more about the new music they’re listening to. 

Social Sharing and Rankings

On one hand, people just love sharing their music tastes and knowing what their followers are listening to. On the other hand, Spotify has carefully created competition among it’s customers. 

The streaming service presents you with a set of statistics that make comparisons very easy. You can look at how many different songs you listened to, how many minutes you spent listening to music, and how many minutes you spent listening to a specific artist or a specific song. The best feature of the lot is ranking users in percentiles of time spent listening.

For example, if you’re ranked in the top 1% of Taylor Swift listeners, you can make the claim that you’re a bigger fan than 99% of the world. This is an overpowered marketing tool for passionate fandoms who are extremely invested in their favorite artists. You can even compare your love for music as a whole with others through the total number of minutes you spent listening to music. Just be careful—songs you download and play offline don’t get added to your time spent listening!

Awards and Badges

Spotify doesn’t fail with it’s marketing, though. Any negative reactions they collect are nullified by their awards. You can earn tons of different badges and rewards for specific milestones. They literally celebrate you for your music; who doesn’t want that? Picked up a new genre? Its an accomplishment! Have you continued to listen to the same genre as last year? You’re consistent! Collect badges and feel amazing! 

Was the Design Poor this Year? 

Spotify Wrapped is usually very well-designed. They use aesthetic patterns and animations for each slide and have several options for the cover slide, which you can share on social media. However, the approach they took with their design this year isn’t for everybody. The color palette is vibrant and catches the eye, but it doesn’t feel as smooth as previous editions. It almost feels unfinished; some of the animation is grainy when you’re going through the slides and some users can’t access the new Me in 2023 feature. 

Honestly, it isn’t surprising that they’re stretched thin. Spotify has seen a 20+% increase in its users over the past year. That’s a ton more data to process, especially with the new features they added this year. The results aren’t so bad that they cause a mass rejection of the palette, but the cracks are definitely visible. I don’t think people would have cared if the service took another week to iron out the kinks before releasing Wrapped 2023. Personally, I think it should drop a bit closer to New Years’ Eve anyway. 

Me in 2023

Any mistakes in their design are quickly forgotten with the new features they’ve added. Personally, I think these are the best updates we’ve gotten to Spotify Wrapped in years. The ‘Me in 2023’ assigns you an avatar depending on your listening habits. Find out whether you’ve listened to music like Vampire, Mastermind, Robotice, Time Traveler, Cyclops, Luminary, Shapreshifter, Collector, Hunter, Fanatic, Hypnotist or Alchemist. You can find all the explanations on their website and in your app. 

Sound Town

This is the most creative use of data analytics Spotify has used for Wrapped since they came up with the idea. The service created a musical personality for all the world’s major cities and analyzed your music habits. In 2023, you can see which city has a music taste most similar to yours. While it doesn’t have as many sharing opportunities as Rankings or Top Artists, it’s a cool feature that adds to the experience of using Spotify as your go-to streaming service. 

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny Spotify has taken over the world’s music streaming scene. They hold over 33% of the global market share and prove why they deserve the number one spot every time a year ends. So jump on the bandwagon and learn more about your own music taste.

Share your favorite Spotify Wrapped moments in the comments!