How Spotify Used Psychology to Perfect Its Experience

Jen Clinehens
Choice Hacking
Published in
6 min readNov 27, 2023

--

Source: Adobe Stock

Spotify, the Swedish music streaming service, has one of the most admired digital experiences in the world.

With more than 570 million monthly active users and an impressive 226 million paying subscribers, it’s an easy-to-use, fun, and effective platform.

But how did this streamer become one of the world’s biggest and most admired companies?

Unsurprisingly, it’s down to a bit of psychology and behavioral science — applied knowingly (or not) to Spotify’s customer experience…

1. Spotify Wrapped: The Gold-Standard in Personalized Marketing

Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign is one of the most admired (and copied) marketing campaigns around, and for good reason.

It summarizes and ranks a customer’s annual Spotify usage (dubbed “your year in audio”).

Then Spotify pops that data into a beautiful animated presentation that users can easily share on social media.

(You can watch some videos of real Wrapped campaigns here: 2021 ; 2022)

--

--

Jen Clinehens
Choice Hacking

ChoiceHackingIdeas.com // Brands win when they know what makes buyers tick (behavioral science, psychology, AI)