We’ve put Wrapped into the world for several years now, and people have come to expect and look forward to a retrospective of their music. But now that we’ve built momentum in this franchise, we face the challenge of giving users a look back at their listening in new and exciting ways. We knew we needed to tell a visually engaging and culturally relevant story that went beyond listing data points and encouraged listeners to talk about their listening on social.

Spotify Wrapped has always been a tool of self-exploration and expression; helping people connect what they listen to and who they are. But in 2021, more people than ever—particularly Gen Z—were seeking non-traditional methods of understanding like astrology, mysticism, spirituality and more. So we decided it was time for those trends to extend into Wrapped. We created Audio Aura: a visualization of your listening habits, specifically your listening “moods,” made up to resemble the ancient form of energy reading called aura photography. An animated mixture of colors expressed the energy in your listening, and by extension, a part of your personal identity. And just like everything in Spotify Wrapped, it was built to be shared.

Our objective every year is to boost word of mouth - and we knew that a focus on Gen Z would be the best way to make this happen. Because so much of this audience is discussing, debating, and sharing their Wrapped on instagram and TikTok, we were faced with the challenge of giving people visually interesting ways to talk about their unique listening. To gather the data for this - we first aggregated each users’ listening history and created six broad mood categories. This included counting the number of streams for a given track, retrieving its top mood descriptors, bucketing those descriptors into categories, and then narrowing those six categories into the two with highest number of streams.

This data story was made possible by a cross-functional team of creatives, designers, UX designers, and data scientists. Together, with the help of a professional aura reader, the team worked together to sort through data sets, aligning colors to music moods. Via platform meta data that was already assigned to songs on platform, the team was able to determine the users top “music mood” and deliver an “audio aura” to the listener. This specific data story kicked off in August 2021 with ideation, went into wireframing in September 2021, then data testing in October 2021, and finally launched on December 1, 2021 to all eligible Spotify users across the globe.

Over 122M users engaged with 2021 Wrapped data stories this year. 33% of engaged users took a screenshot or downloaded a data story, with rates up to 41% among Gen Z users. It received over 15.8K+ global earned stories in press, 2.8M+ views on Spotify’s For the Record Blog, and 2,160 concierge influencer posts.

There were over 95M organic impressions and 2.7M+ engagements across all social content.

Audio Aura was the most mentioned feature in PR of the Wrapped experience in 2021. It was the 5th most shared story, and mentioned over 16k times on social media - much of the chatter being about how shocked people were by the accuracy they received in their results.