As we prepare to launch 2020 Wrapped, we remind ourselves of the challenges we took on and lessons learned to make this year’s experience even better for audio fans, like you, around the world.
Spotify divided the 2019 list into listening habits around the world and in the US. The most-listened-to artist in the world was Post Malone, who raked in a staggering more than 6.5 billion streams. Premium and Free users alike can share the results with friends, family, and followers through Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook with a personalized “2019 Wrapped” or “My Decade Wrapped” share card. These are complete with a summary of your top tracks, artists, and genre from their listening history on Spotify.
The 2019 Wrapped campaign was a first on many fronts. It was the first Wrapped experience to exist in-app, give our listeners a look back on the past 10 years of music and culture, and the first to shine a light on how our artists and podcasters connected with their listeners over the past 10 years.
Along with processing a decade’s worth of data for over 240 million active users (you can read more from our data team here), we wanted to take on the challenge of transitioning the Wrapped experience from web-only to in-app. To accomplish this, multiple sub-teams were responsible for a range of functions, including marketing, legal, design, data, and frontend and backend engineering. This undertaking was a company-wide effort and one that was met with both successes and learning experiences.
Setting the stage
We have a number of learnings that we can carry forward like what worked well and what could have been improved — we wanted to share some of those highlights.
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The product team is modeled like a startup, which proved beneficial during development; lean, resilient, innovative, risk-taking, and using mistakes as learning opportunities. Emma bunton free me spotify playlists. The goal was to create an engaging, shareable experience for users, and the developer team needed to strike a balance between the product team’s aspirations, minimizing risks, and managing dependencies for execution. It required creativity and flexibility in problem-solving.
Empower the team through clear goals and step aside
The team, composed of different disciplines including Insights, Design, Product and Tech, gathered to define their respective priorities and KPIs. This was very useful for onboarding engineers on to the project, motivating and empowering them to make decisions, and prioritizing, first and foremost, the work. A question like, “Should I fix a bug for sharing or for the stories experience?” was easily answered without bottlenecks.
To give users the best native experience possible, the experience needed to be:
To determine if these qualifications were met, clear and quantifiable objectives were essential to empowering the engineering team.
A Lean approach
With input from the project stakeholders, a reverse timeline of essential events with key dates and milestones was established, including the go-live date, when the code should be frozen, the date when the Release Candidate would be submitted to the Apple/Google Store, the point at which real data from users/employees would be received, and when to start coding.
To simplify communication and organization, milestones were set for Fridays. It eased decisions around dates, and brought consistency and accountability to set commitments.
To develop a product by the release date, we followed a lean approach to manage the development process. We took an incremental approach to product development and broke down the product vision into the bare bones of an MVP (minimum viable product) — Version 0.1; a stories container with audio and static stories…no animations whatsoever. From there, we began adding features based on the team’s goals for future versions, and delivered version 0.2 to market.
How we built it
The team began as a small group of iOS, Android, and backend engineers working to create a native experience on iOS and Android. It was soon realized that the cost and effort needed to develop the personalized, shareable card for each story and user was underestimated — the decision to either re-scope the functionality or find another solution had to be made quickly.
The initial system design looked liked this:
The engineering team drafted a proposal and built a proof of concept of a backend service that could render those images, in real time, incorporating CEF (a C++ library), using HTML templates and CSS 3.1. The solution was clear, and the question soon became, “how do we staff a team with back-end and web engineers to be flexible with rigid time constraints?”
It’s never too early to get started
We were building a product for the largest marketing initiative of the year. Though we began work earlier than previous years, there were still challenges that made this an intense ride.
For a global marketing campaign, localization is an essential consideration. For example, in Japanese, line breaks can change the meaning of a sentence and break a message. And for the first time, right-to-left languages were supported. It wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but with the addition of animations like the genre bars or a spinning globe…?. Play link on spotify desktop app.
Numerous corner cases were found along the way simply due to the sheer magnitude of data processed, like what do we do if a user has only listened to podcasts? Or what if they only listened to a handful of podcasts? What if a user only listened to a single genre, or listened to music from one country? These were just a few of the cases we came across. There were many, many more.
The team needed to be resilient and so did our systems. We handled translations from the backend to have certain flexibility to deal with last minute translation issues. Like 1 hour before going live when a Japanese string was causing the iOS experience to crash for certain users.
The Results
The final system ended up looking like this:
Three days before going live, while doing load testing we realized we needed to scale up traffic estimations. We fine-tuned the GKE configuration, added an additional caching layer for the payload of our downstream dependencies, and removed a race condition in the Image Generator component. And as an additional precaution, we ran a data job to pre-generate some images for the initial peak of traffic — a 42-hour job generating around 535 million images completed 2 hours before going live.
We were happy to say that the 2019 Wrapped campaign was well received and building the native experience was worth the effort and stress to excite/delight audio fans all around the globe.
The fellowship of Wrapped
We’d like to thank the Edison Tribe under the Growth Opportunities Mission, Marketing, Brand + Creative, and all those who contributed to making this project successful. We couldn’t have done it without you. 2020 Wrapped is coming soon, so stay tuned and keep listening!
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Youtube app lg smart tv. Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming service’s annual rundown of your year in music, is back. But unlike last year’s rundown that focused on the year in review, Spotify is closing out the year with a look at both 2019 and the decade as a whole. The service also released a list of the global top tracks and artists of 2019 and the decade.
The rundown, released Thursday, offers a pretty comprehensive look at your stats. It breaks down artists by what time of year you listened to them, how many genres you tried out, how long you listened to each category, and even how many countries’ music you listen to. It also asks if you want to tweet at your number one artist to let them know.
Spotify Wrapped 2019 Not Working
The rundown also looks at how your music has changed over the 2010s. It shows a graph demonstrating how many minutes you listened each year, before looking at your number one song and artist for each year.
Spotify 2019 Wrapped On App
Spotify has gradually demonstrated to users how its data can provide fun insights into user listening habits. Its “2018 goals” marketing campaign drew on data around playlists, like showing that 3,445 people streamed the “Boozy Brunch” playlist on a Wednesday.
The rundown has already proven a smash hit, with the hashtag “#spotifywrapped” trending on Twitter. Users declared artists like Nicki Minaj, Eminem and Billie Eilish as their number one listens. Some used the hashtag to share their parodies, with one The Simpsons fan account listing Kirk Van Houten as one of their most-played artists.
It can throw up some rather bizarre results. As with last year, when Inverse tried the result it listed a background noise album as one of the most popular artists. Shout out to High Altitude Samples for some killer night sleeps.
Spotify has also given artists ways to access their own personal breakdowns, enabling them to access more information like countries where fans are based and the highest number of fan streams per hour. Billie Eilish’s album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? apparently helped more people get to sleep than any other artist in 2019.
Spotify Wrapped: how to access
There are several simple ways to look at your rundown of the year.
For the full experience, it’s best to check out the rundown via the smartphone app. This provides a detailed breakdown of stats, complete with all the showy flying data.
Spotify Wrapped: the top artists and songs of 2019
Here is Spotify’s rundown of the year in review:
Most-Streamed Artists
Most-Streamed Female Artists
Most-Streamed Male Artists
Most-Streamed Tracks
Most-Streamed Albums
Most-Streamed Podcasts
Spotify Wrapped 2019 Stats
My 2019 Wrapped Spotify
Most-Streamed Spotify Original Podcasts
Spotify Wrapped: top songs and artists of the 2010s
Here is Spotify’s rundown of how the decade went:
Most-Streamed Artists of the Decade (Global)
Most-Streamed Female Artists of the Decade (Global)
Most-Streamed Male Artists of the Decade (Global)
Most-Streamed Tracks of the Decade (Global)
Stay tuned for next year when Spotify digs up its users’ guilty faves again.
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