Spotify's Wrapped shows why user activity data is incomplete without behavioral insights

What is Spotify Wrapped?

It’s that time of year when Spotify shows us who we really are. However, knowing your music persona is not Spotify’s sole intention. Wrapped is a really good campaign. They make your annual listening activity into beautiful mosaic slides ready to press to Instagram. You can post beautiful messages tagging your top artists and thank them for inspiring your year. You get an email 5 days before #Wrapped that changes the whole experience from just another notification into a holiday gift you can’t wait to unwrap.

It’s designed to be shared. The sharing creates this sea of FOMO on our socials that everyone without Spotify wonders who they really are. Such a dose of loss aversion, delivered right at the beginning of the holiday season when wallets are open for guilt free spending drives subscriptions to Spotify. It’s been so successful that other brands hop onto the Wrapped train and even Apple Music started their own version - Replay.

I’m not complaining, Wrapped is actually a really good experience. I like the animation, the gamification and the huge year-on-year feature improvements. I actually like it a lot. Unfortunately, when I got my 2022 Wrapped, it didn’t feel like Spotify knew me at all.

This is why my 2022 Wrapped was incomplete

My Wrapped results this time round felt a little strange. I didn’t learn anything new and worse still, it left me wondering how Spotify made sense of my activity from the whole year.

My Top Artist was based on my in-flight sleeping music
My Top Genres was heavily influenced by random gym workout playlists
I actually skipped most of the 100 Songs of 2022 Playlist and …
My Listening Personality reminded me that I was mostly looking and never finding

It’s true I listened to what Spotify compiled into my year end statements. Their record of accounts is a very accurate shopping receipt of simple account activity. It leaves me wondering if Spotify is keeping their promise.

When I left Spotify on auto pilot to drown out noise during a flight, was I listening to the music I wanted to listen to? How much weight should random workout playlists contribute to my curated listening preferences? If I spent time scrolling through playlists looking for interesting music that I might like, does that mean I have an adventurous listening personality? If the answer to these questions is yes, then we have a problem.

Instead of personalised content, we are all consuming the same thing

Spotify promised to help us discover our kind of music with ease. They would read our minds and serve up the right tunes at the right time. All the streaming services claim to know just what we need to consume from their ever increasing catalog of content.

However, it seems that we scroll and search to no end. We serve dinner and clear our plates before we find something to watch. Our online activity spikes when there’s an album drop or a single release. The competitive edge seems to have somewhat shifted from the promise of curating personal favorites to exclusive popular premiers. Premiering content social proofs everyone into watching the same thing not because its your match, but because it’s popular.

These user habits demonstrate that while these platforms have a tonne of user activity data, they still can’t tell why you skipped that song, or stopped a series 30 minutes into the first episode. Confirmation biases may lead one to assume that something else happened other than the content served didn’t match your preference at the time. While your are hoping your favorite streaming service get their suggestions right, they are assuming your are clicking on the right things. User activity data is not enough to infer human preference and habits. It’s far more inadequate to extrapolate from it assumed future human behavior.

A product or service that builds its entire value proposition on learning from your habits to offer up the best content should combine such data with behavioral insights. Why did the user do What they did? Without this, we will still find nothing to watch on streaming platforms with inconceivably huge catalogs of content.

No Spotify, I am not an adventurous listening personality type

The level of insight fidelity lacking here is the distinction between passive and active music consumption behaviors. Workout, sleeping and focus music may fit into a passive category that is driven by the functional nature and utility driven aspects of such music. You may not listen to such music because you love the genre, you may not even know the artists in such a playlist, but you keep going to it because it fits the activity it’s created for. These activities are also quite repetitive and form a big part of daily routine. Their high frequency inflates their significance, but maybe we should attribute them as outliers.

Active behavioral insights on the other hand, reflect conscious listening habits. It’s more reflective of your true choices, your taste and the artists you love. Such insights may even demonstrate a level of indulgence, a lingering baseline far much more useful in creating a personality type. You are likely to curate your personal playlists from this kind listening and even though it may not happen often, it’s more meaningful.

If my 2022 Spotify Wrapped is anything to go by, I should expect a cocktail of workout, sleeping orchestras and a mix of everything else to inundate my suggestions. I presume that without hard work seeking out new music, my listening activity will keep compounding inadvertently.

I wish Spotify had deduced the Whys for my 2022 listening activity. Maybe they would have looked past all that white noise sleeping and focus music. They would have known it wasn’t easy discovering music. It would have been clear I am not the adventurous listening personality type. I am a deep diving re-player who listens to one song over and over until I randomly find it’s replacement. I hope in 2023, finding replacements will not be as hard and my activity will be influenced more by the few songs I’ll play over and over again.