Did Spotify Wrapped 2025 redeem themselves?
đ° NoGood News Vol. 107 | Happy Spotify Wrapped day, aka every marketer's Super Bowl
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Spotify Wrapped 2025 recap: Spotify Wrapped flopped last year, so was 2025 any better? Spotify Wrapped 2024 pushed its latest AI features, which caused backlash. But this year, they cooked up something different, and it mightâve won those users back.
Your follower count is irrelevant: The gap between who follows you and who actually views and engages with your content continues to widen. Signs point to one thing: follower counts donât hold the same value that they used to anymore.
The strategy behind Wicked: For Goodâs marketing: Rather than a routine movie drop, they transformed Wicked into a multi-year-long event thanks to their âslow burnâ campaign.
Ready? Let's get into it.Â
đ¶ Spotify Wrapped 2025 recap
How Spotify won their users back through gamification
Spotify Wrapped flopped last year, so was today any better?
Spotify Wrapped 2025 dropped today, marking the 5th year of Wrapped dropping on a Wednesday.
Last year, Spotify received backlash for pushing their latest AI features onto Wrapped: the AI DJ, AI podcast, and AI-generated playlists.
Many fans were disappointed in Spotifyâs choice, claiming it felt less personalized and more like a product launch.
But Spotify Wrapped 2025 leaned into a completely different direction: gamification.
One big difference in its UX was vertical scrolling.
They ditched swiping through stories for a format users are already hooked on, which aligns with their efforts to become more like a social media app (aka their DM feature).
But the gamification went beyond just scrolling.
Spotify added interactive elements that turned your listening habits into a social experience:
Top Song Quiz: Users could guess their most listened-to song before the reveal, adding an element of surprise and engagement.
Wrapped Party: Friends can start a party or join one using a code to compare music habits side by side, turning listening to music into a competition.
Listening Age: Spotify guesses your age based on the era of your song choices this year, adding a playful twist to self-discovery.
Wrapped Clubs: Users are placed into clubs based on their listening style and assigned roles like Leader or Scout, creating a sense of community and identity around music taste.
After last yearâs AI backlash, Spotify had a choice: double down or pivot.
Instead of highlighting their features, they highlighted what you do and made it competitive, community-driven, and interactive while tapping into peopleâs reward systems.
Spotify Wrapped is arguably one of the most popular cultural moments of the year (marketers and designers can attest to that), and risking their reputation wasnât an option.
To protect that legacy, they needed to practice social listening, and deliver what their users actually wanted.
And by doing that, Spotify Wrapped can stay on top against other âwrappedâ players like Apple Music Replay.
What are your thoughts on Spotify Wrapped 2025?
đ± Your follower count is irrelevant
Why itâs time to rethink how you measure social media success
The baseline definition of a âfollowerâ is simple: someone who clicks the âfollowâ or âsubscribeâ button on a social media profile or page. For years, this definition came with an implied understanding: that a follower is someone actively opting into viewing, liking, and potentially sharing your content with their own network. It was a clear transaction: they follow you, they see your posts, they engage.
The problem? While the baseline definition remains unchanged, the actual value and function of a follower has been fundamentally disrupted.
The follower fallacy boils down to one critical misunderstanding: treating the follower as a functional marker of your audience when it has become merely symbolic. With the rise of algorithm-driven feeds and search-driven platform behaviors, the majority of people who see your content arenât following you at all.
This doesnât mean followers are completely worthless, but it does mean you canât view the follower count metric in isolation (or treat it as a reliable indicator of reach, influence, or impact). Follower count is one data point in a much larger picture, and itâs very often not even the most important one.
The sooner we stop obsessing over this vanity metric and start looking at what actually demonstrates content performance and audience connection, the better equipped weâll be to achieve real, tangible growth.
𫧠The strategy behind Wicked: For Good marketing
How Wickedâs marketing team beat customer fatigue
Targeted Brand Partnerships: Instead of spearheading generic efforts like Wicked Happy Meal and being done with it, Universal launched a strategic campaign to secure the brand deals they knew would matter to their target audience. Michael Moses, the CMO of Universal, was interviewed about the Wicked marketing by Variety last year, and compared their marketing strategy to Barbieâs; it was similarly massive, and aimed to mainly appeal to women (as did both of these movies).
Strategic Pop Culture Placements: In February of 2024, they released the first ever trailer for the film as a Super Bowl ad, ending it with a sneak preview of Wickedâs most iconic song, Defying Gravity. By releasing the first trailer during a cultural moment such as the Super Bowl, Wicked cemented itself as a cultural moment of similar importance (plus, we know from the effects of Taylor Swiftâs relationship with Travis Kelce on the NFL that cross-marketing works).
Social Media Community Ownership: Instead of only pushing official content, however, Wickedâs marketing strategy lent itself to sharing and remixing as a result of the highly quotable aspects of the musical, its press tour, and its other marketing efforts. This inserted Wicked into spaces where it previously wasnât present in an organic and relatable way, a stark contrast to their paid campaigns.
đïž Q&A with an expert
A bi-weekly interview series with the best in the game
Q: âYou donât own your followers; the platform does.â Can you elaborate on this statement?
A: Hereâs the reality: followers are platform-held audiences subject to algorithmic gatekeeping, not owned assets. What you actually control is your content and its reach potential â and the data increasingly shows these are decoupled metrics. When a single post can reach 10 million non-followers while your follower base sees 2% organic reach, optimizing for follower count becomes a vanity metric that actively obscures real performance.
Q: Are there cases where follower count remains relevant or where reach-driven/social-search-driven strategies underperform?
A: Yeah, absolutely. Follower count still matters in specific contexts â itâs not completely dead, just dramatically less important than we used to think. The clearest case is community-building contexts. If youâre trying to launch a membership platform, a course, or any kind of paid community, follower count can serve as social proof that you have an established audience base to convert. Itâs not that the followers themselves will all convert, but it signals youâve built something people wanted to opt into at some point.
âïž We wish we wrote this
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I'm not sure how I feel about their paid ads a couple of days before the Wrapped release (I saw them on TikTok). It felt a bit weird (and slightly desperate?) from their side. Like, everyone knows it's coming, and everyone waits for it. You aren't getting any new users thanks to this ad. It would make more sense to just post it on the organic channels, so those who are impatient can go there and check. Why waste money?
The Wrapped itself was better than last year's, but felt a bit safe and bland (in terms of design, for example)