Why Spotify Wrapped left us feeling unsatisfied
Dissecting the good, the bad, and the ugly of Spotify Wrapped 2020.
Around the start of the holiday season, several companies release their highly anticipated holiday themed products, features, and accessories. We see companies embrace the holidays as we buy our Starbucks coffee in decorative cups, watch Christmas themed commercials as Hulu subscribers, and of course, unwrap our musical journey for the year with Spotify Wrapped.
This year however, Spotify Wrapped fell a little short. It incorporated new features that were aimed at making users feel better about the rather disappointing year they’ve endured. Spotify Wrapped also made use of a humorous tone to inject comedy into a stressful time and used a multimedia presentation of users’ favorite songs and artists complete with audio, flashy graphics, and bright colors.
Here’s why it didn’t work.
The use of self deprecating humor simply didn’t hit.
While Spotify used a consistent tone in this year’s Wrapped that conveyed a keen perception of the state of the world, the exact messaging felt a bit too depressing.
They used phrases like “The song that helped you get through it all”, “Feel free to show this to your exes”, and “Who was at your side besides your houseplants” that showed great situational awareness but ended up making users feel worse about their lives instead of better.
For example the messaging “2 years from now, you’ll remember this as the song that helped you get through 2020”, offers both situational awareness AND hope & optimism. As a feel good feature that releases once a year, Spotify Wrapped should be focused on more than “keeping it real”; they should be trying to make their users — well — feel good.
The colors didn’t cut it.
The bright and eclectic colors of this year’s Spotify Wrapped didn’t just break from standard holiday color patterns, they weren’t even in the same universe.
More so than feeling out of place, the 12+ colors ranging from dark blues to neon greens made for an overwhelming and inconsistent user experience.
By using a palette that contained neon shades of almost every color from the rainbow, Spotify Wrapped’s color scheme took users back to the 80’s. Normally that could be lauded as a bold creative choice. This year however, what users really needed was to be inspired with a taste for the future which could have been achieved by a more modern and seasonal color palette.
Another pain point was the visual and interaction design.
It missed the mark both aesthetically and in terms of significance. For example, take a look at the circle gradient below that Spotify Wrapped used as a backdrop for some of the visuals. The gradient embodies a black center separating warm colors on top from cool colors on the bottom. By itself, while it’s not necessarily bad design, it isn’t particularly aesthetic. The transition of the gradient into a thick black chunk in the middle feels quite harsh, especially for the holiday season.
More importantly, there’s no apparent significance to the shape or the colors used within the shape.
It feels like Spotify missed a great opportunity to introduce a more complex visual, maybe that of a record player, an amp, or a guitar to further connect the users to the mission of the Wrapped feature — a musical reflection of the last year. The same goes for the four fold graphic also pictured below, which similarly lacks in both aesthetics and significance.
Finally, the audio experience was nothing memorable with abrupt transitions that fell flat. This meant people with eclectic music tastes often had to stomach quick vibe changes (for example my Wrapped was playing a slow Ed Sheeran song one second and switched to a thumping Major Lazer beat immediately after with no fade in or fade out). In terms of providing pleasant and meaningful visuals and interactions to its users, Spotify didn’t get it quite right.
Features that failed to add value to the user.
Every year, Spotify Wrapped has a great way of telling us things about ourselves that we don’t even know. These instances usually end up leaving us with an “a-ha” moment at which point we then feel inclined to share the new thing we’ve discovered about ourselves with the world via instagram.
There wasn’t too much of that this year. Wrapped had two interesting features called “Pioneer” and “Genrelust” that were both aimed at making users feel like explorers at a time when lots of users have been more confined than ever before.
However, the features were vague and lacked the level of substance and detail we’ve seen in the past.
It’s cool for about a hot second to know that I’ve discovered “59 new genres” or that I listened to “Jehosaphat before it hit 50k streams” (even though I don’t even remember listening to it). However, the information is not something that I’m compelled to share with others because even to me it holds little significance. It’s disappointing that even with the plethora of data that Spotify has access to regarding users’ music tastes and preferences, they weren’t able to incorporate facts that better helped users discover something consequential about their music preferences. What could have some of those facts been? Let’s take a look at that next.
There were several missed opportunities for product features.
A huge goal of Spotify Wrapped is to make users nostalgic, in a good way. As songs can often be a trigger for reminding a person of a place, time, or thing, it’s only natural that Spotify Wrapped tries to immerse users in an enhanced musical experience that helps them relive and reflect on the past year. Here are some features that could have helped in that goal:
Potential Features:
A display of a user’s personal evolution from 2019 to 2020.
What’s stronger than looking at a single year in isolation is looking at several years as a continuum along which your musical tastes evolve. For instance, a feature that compares your top liked artists from last year to this year would be a nice touch that allows users to introspect on ways they’ve changed (or haven’t) in the last year.
A way to connect users to each other.
This year, people were more isolated from their social circles than ever before. Spotify Wrapped missed a big opportunity to bring people together using music by introducing features such as “here’s what you had in common with your friends”, “here’s where your musical tastes overlapped with other listeners from the Bay Area”, or “here’s where the music you listened to was recorded”. These sorts of features would enable a user to feel that their musical journey is larger than just them and give them a sense of connection with larger communities.
Wrapping it up: It just wasn’t that great.
Instead of pretty pictures and comforting vibes we got LSD induced visuals and self deprecating humor. Instead of sharing what we learned about ourselves on social media, we sat quietly wanting more.
