Spotify wanted to set itself apart from its competition by tapping into the large pool of listener data it had amassed over the past decade. Spotify created Spotify Singles, a series of fun insight- and data-driven playlists that explored the world's personal relationship with music. These playlists, developed without using any media spend, increased Spotify visitors, impressions, and press coverage.
Objective and Context:
The objective was to transform Spotify's listener data into creative expressions that were relevant, personal, and unique to the user.
Target Audience:
The target audience was loyal Spotify subscribers.
Creative Strategy:
Spotify Singles, a series of fun insight- and data-driven playlists, aimed to use listener data in unique ways and provide outlets for listeners to express musical preferences.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The first Spotify Single playlist was "Taste Rewind," a musical time machine that — based on a listener's tastes today — showed what s/he would be listening to if s/he lived in another era.
Next, the "Found Them First" playlist helped fans prove they were really into a band before they were famous. Spotify used listening data to show listeners all the bands they discovered way ahead of the pack.
The third playlist, "MixtUp," used the idea that couples and friends don't always love the same tunes. By entering two favorite artists, listeners learned the degrees of separation between them and got a playlist that seamlessly filled the gap.
Mobile Execution:
The data from each experiment was transformed into not only a personalized sharable digital object to express the user's musical taste, but also provided a tool by which they could discover more music based on their current personal tastes, which was backed by data.
Spotify Singles resulted in more than two million visitors to Spotify, hundreds of millions of social impressions, and extensive press coverage. Spotify achieved these results with zero media spend.
