Spotify Wrapped arrives each year with colour, chaos and a surprising amount of PR genius. From artist shout-outs to your brutally honest “listening age”, it proves how data and storytelling can turn audiences into eager sharers. Bea Widdup explains why Wrapped is the PR lesson we didn’t know we needed.
Every December, Spotify Wrapped drops into our phones like an excitable intern bursting into the Monday meeting shouting, “GUYS, I MADE A GRAPHIC AND THE CLIENT LIKES IT!”
And honestly? It’s the greatest PR case study of the year.
Because Wrapped isn’t just a roundup of your questionable music choices. It is a masterclass in brand storytelling, personalisation, audience psychology, and the kind of data-led comms that makes PR people go, ‘Ooh, that’s clever,’ while quietly deleting the evidence of their 2025 Westlife relapse.
This year, Spotify dialled up the chaos by adding personalised videos from your most-streamed artist.
Imagine it: you’ve spent 12 months listening to the same three sad-girl playlists, and suddenly Billie Eilish pops up on your phone like, “Hey bestie! Thanks for the emotional damage – here’s a video.”
From a PR perspective, this is lethal. They’ve created direct parasocial intimacy at scale – a one-to-many message that feels gloriously one-to-one.
It’s the equivalent of your favourite brand’s CEO leaning over the counter and whispering,
“Thanks for buying the shampoo. We see you. We love you. We approve of your fringe era.”
This is what every comms strategy dreams of – content that forges connection, costs pennies, and makes people voluntarily repost their own data.
Spotify Wrapped also gives you a “listening age,” which is basically a way of saying “You claim to be 38, but according to our algorithm you peaked in 1964.”
In PR terms, this is genius.
It’s identity marketing – letting the audience feel seen (even when what’s being seen is their unshakeable commitment to 00’s emo).
Imagine if brands did this.
Wrapped reminds us that people love content that both roasts and celebrates them.
Brands that master that balance? Catnip.
If you want to understand real PR risk, look no further than your most-played tracks.
Because no matter how sophisticated your public persona is, your Wrapped will happily reveal:
It’s humbling. It’s horrifying.
It’s also a reminder of the most important PR principle on earth:
People love authenticity – until it accidentally exposes who they really are.
Spotify weaponises that tension perfectly.
Wrapped is personal enough to feel meaningful, but polished enough that you’ll still share it on Instagram Stories (crop out the embarrassing bits, obviously).
Brands should take note:
Give people content that is about them, not just for them.
Make it fun, make it flattering, make it memeable.
If they can turn it into social currency, they’ll do your PR for free.
Wrapped works because it pulls every golden comms lever at once.
It transforms cold analytics into warm, witty data storytelling, dresses up algorithmic guesses as personalised ego boosts, and fuels pure participation psychology by letting everyone compare their sonic chaos with everyone else’s.
It floods social feeds in a tidal wave of neon rectangles – the kind of shareability most brands would sell their entire marketing budget for – and ties it all together with a hit of micro-intimacy, where your favourite artist appears to speak directly to you (while actually recording the same message for a small country’s worth of listeners).
It’s PR brilliance wrapped – literally – in a colourful slideshow.
This year, my Wrapped told me my listening age is 26, my top artist thinks we’re friends, and I’ve apparently spent 9,000 minutes listening to “focus playlists,” which is funny because I remember focusing precisely zero times.
But it also reminded me that great PR doesn’t shout.
It shows up in your inbox, taps you on the shoulder, and says “Here’s your story – want to share it?”
Spotify Wrapped proves something the Satsuma crew believed all along.
When you make the audience the hero, they’ll carry your message to the ends of the earth (or at least to their Instagram followers).
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