How to Look at Spotify End of Year in Review

Good morning! This Th, it's year-in-review time at Spotify, Square is now Block, Meta will permit researchers access removed content, and people are accusing Stripe of having a "hire-and-fire mentality."

Spotify has mastered the year-end look back

It's the well-nigh wonderful time of the yr. For Spotify users, that means information technology'due south Spotify Wrapped time.

Spotify Wrapped is a year-in-review playlist and slideshow that serves up diverse data points from the past yr of listening.

• It includes stats similar how many minutes of music people listened to, favorite artists and songs, and how close someone might be to beingness a superfan. (At least one Protocol reporter is in the top 1% of Taylor Swift's listeners this year.)
• Spotify Wrapped also gives artists a glimpse at the number of streams they received, hours people listened, number of listeners and how many countries listeners were located in for the twelvemonth.

Wrapped has been a striking for the company always since Spotify launched its year-in-review campaigns over v years ago. Co-ordinate to market analytics house MoEngage, Wrapped gives Spotify a large boost in new installs: Its mobile app downloads increased by 21% in the first week of December last year. More than ninety million people engaged with Spotify Wrapped in 2020, the visitor reported.

• CEO Daniel Ek called the season "historically our biggest quarter of the year" in the visitor'due south October earnings call.
• "Spotify's offering is much more than heavily marketed across various channels — including in-app, social, media placements and more — and simply more shareable in its presentation," Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower, told Protocol in an email. "Wrapped creates a huge opportunity for Spotify to extend its achieve through social motivation and, yes, FOMO."

Why is Spotify the simply company that is doing this then well , or at all? Spotify has managed to achieve the about rare of things: create a 18-carat cultural moment every twelvemonth, a solar day on which everyone on the internet seems to be talking virtually the aforementioned thing. So why doesn't Netflix offer a look back at all the shows you lot binge-watched this year? Where's YouTube's report on all the rabbit holes yous went deepest into? Could Twitter tell yous nearly your favorite accounts, nearly viral tweets and the person to whom you lot thirstily reply nearly often? Which of my Slack messages got the about political party parrots? A few users joked about Spotify Wrapped being merely "data collection merely make it cool," but it's clear that Wrapped is actually the kind of data usage people really enjoy.

• There are a few similar things out there, similar the unofficial Instagram Top 9 tool or Apple Music's Replay characteristic (which is, frankly, only a playlist). Not many, though, and none as good or as popular every bit Wrapped.
• Office of it is surely just focus. Apple, Amazon and YouTube all take music and sound divisions, merely for Spotify, music and sound is its entire business. "Spotify dominates the chat, not just because it's the largest, but it'due south likewise the most practiced in this regard," Nelson said.
• Wrapped also gets better equally Spotify gets smarter. This year'south offer includes things like "Audio Aureola," which describes the vibes of your music using colors and moods, and an automatic movie soundtrack to your life based on your listening habits. Is it silly? Yep. It's also more testify of how well Spotify has come to actually sympathise the audio on its platform, and all the tools that come with it. Spotify has long talked nearly wanting to sympathise sound like information technology does software, and features similar Wrapped are what that enables.

This isn't necessarily an easy thing to become right. For example: Remember a few years ago, when Facebook's Twelvemonth in Review feature showed a lot of people photos and posts they'd rather non have been confronted with again? Doing something similar this, where it's not just "your most popular stuff" or something like simply an actual dive into what matters to users, takes real thought and care and a deep understanding of the content itself. In that sense, Spotify might have it easy with sound. But either way, information technology's much closer than anyone else to getting it right.

Though despite all the hype from its users, Spotify's stock tanked most 6% on Wednesday, closing at around $225 per share after opening at $238. Maybe not anybody's excited to be a Taylor Swift superfan.

— Nat Rubio-Licht ( email | twitter )

On the schedule

Crypto and institutional investors

Venture capital letter started the move to treat crypto as just another asset class. Which institutional investors are virtually primed to consider crypto? What infrastructure is required for institutional needs? Bring together Tomio Geron at nine a.m. PT on Mon where he, Anchorage's Diogo Mónica and Paxos' Walter Hessert will answer these questions and more.

A MESSAGE FROM COMCAST

Comcast'due south powerful network keeps people continued. Since 2017, Comcast has invested more than $15 billion to continue to abound its smart, reliable network. As the technology advances, this network will get fifty-fifty more resilient, faster and more secure.

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People are talking

Don't look to address harm on social media, Frances Haugen told lawmakers:

• "Time is of the essence. There is a lot at pale here."

Gigi Sohn pushed for some conservative support during her confirmation hearing:

• "[I'1000] proud that some of the about conservative goggle box networks are supporting my nomination."

Apple's trying to cease court-ordered App Store changes again:

• "[Without a stay,] the App Store volition accept to be reconfigured — to the detriment of consumers, developers, and Apple itself."

A Stripe recruiter who was let go after four months said the visitor's adopted a "rent-and-fire mentality":

• "I know other people felt similar they were brought in and then left out equally sheep for slaughter."

Making moves

Square is now called Cake . Square Crypto will at present be called Spiral.

Julien Codorniou reportedly left Meta. Codorniou led Facebook Workplace and spent about a decade with the visitor.

Kate Ahlering is Calendly's new chief acquirement officeholder. Ahlering is taking the role from Patrick Moran, who volition be the company'south CMO.

Simon Mutlu joined Lumavate as chief revenue officer. Mutlu has worked with Slack, Liveclicker and others on scaling acquirement.

In other news

Could Biden's vaccine mandate prompt government chaos? Conservatives are supposedly talking about forcing a shutdown unless they can become Democrats to reject money needed to enforce the dominion, sources told Playbook.

Meta is peachy downwards on revenge porn. It's working with a number of other organizations on StopNCII.org to build a global organisation for tracking and stopping nonconsensual intimate images from existence shared.

More Tesla merch: The company is now selling a $1,900 ATV called the "Cyberquad for Kids," which looks similar a smaller companion to the ATV it showed off during the original Cybertruck launch. Coming to a driveway well-nigh you in a few weeks.

Meta and Twitter are both sharing more nearly removed content. Meta created an archive of posts that have been taken downward for breaking its rules on coordinated inauthentic behavior, while Twitter shared more data about 3,465 accounts related to state-linked data operations around the earth.

Match Group is settling a lawsuit with Tinder's co-founders. The visitor is handing them $441 million to cease a years-long arrange that alleged Match Grouping intentionally played downwards Tinder to avoid paying more than money in equity.

TikTok's trying to hold on to creators. The platform introduced Creator Next, which houses all of the ways creators can make coin on the app, forth with a few other monetization tools.

You can now go a standalone version of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams Essentials gives companies longer meeting times and other perks for less money than some of its competitors.

Bret Taylor will report to Marc Benioff, fifty-fifty though they now co-pb Salesforce, according to The Information. Benioff apparently told employees about the arrangement in a Slack bulletin yesterday.

Meta wants to work with AWS on the cloud. The company already has many data centers, but it's partnering with the cloud provider on machine learning and running future acquisitions on AWS infrastructure.

Learn more near Alan Davidson, Joe Biden'southward choice to lead the NTIA. If he's confirmed, he'd play a very important role in guiding the expansion of internet access in the country.

Know who you're buying from

The Markup recently reported that Amazon tends to give its own brands the upper hand in search results. And information technology didn't stop at the investigation: It created a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that detects which brands really belong to Amazon and which ones don't.

Once people visit Amazon'south website, the detector will highlight brands and exclusive products from the company on whatever search results. It's not foolproof, but it still gives a lot more insight into whom yous're buying from.

A MESSAGE FROM COMCAST

In the concluding 10 years, Comcast has invested $30 Billion – and $15 billion since 2017 alone – to grow and evolve America's largest gig-speed broadband network, edifice more than road miles and running fiber deeper to customers' homes to help millions of people stay connected when they need it most.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Transport them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Relish your day, see you tomorrow.

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Source: https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/sourcecode/spotify-wrapped?rebelltitem=1

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