Tag: Written By

How Spotify Made Wrapped More Valuable Than Ever for Artists

November 29, 2023

When 2023 Spotify Wrapped rolls around each year, it’s as much of an event for artists as it is for fans. With Artist Wrapped, musicians can check out a personalized recap of their Spotify stats showing when, where, and how listeners engaged with them on Spotify. 

Since launching Artist Wrapped in 2017, we’ve worked to make this moment bigger and better with each go around, adding data stories with deeper insights, integrations that provide more ways to connect with fans, and delightful moments that extend beyond the core Wrapped experience. 2023 is no exception, and we’re excited for artists to dig into this year’s edition.

“I’m most excited about our efforts to make Artist Wrapped, and Wrapped in general, even more valuable and impactful to artists’ careers this year,” says Rob Fink, Associate Director, Spotify for Artists Brand Marketing. “We’ve built upon many of the foundations established over the past few years so that Wrapped is truly a global platform for artists to effectively connect with their fans.”

Curious what artists can expect from Wrapped this year? For the Record sat down with Rob to get all the details. 

Just like fans, artists love their Wrapped data stories. What can they expect this year?

As usual, we’ll have all the tried-and-true stories artists have come to expect, like total listeners, total number of streams, and total time streamed. But this year, artists can now find out how many listeners discovered them for the first time in 2023. The idea is they can use this data to better understand their listeners and pick out opportunities to expand their audience.

We’re also giving artists more insight into their top fans. Previously we’ve shown artists the number of fans who had them as a top 10, top five, or number one top artist. But this year, we’re also showing artists the average amount of time that each of their top 0.001% fans spent listening to them. This is the first time we’ve ever shown artists a story about the listening time of their very biggest fans, and some of the numbers are quite eye-opening.

Finally, we’re expanding our merch data story to share an artist’s three bestselling items since empowering artist merch stores on Spotify has continued to be a priority for us. We’ve also added a story that reveals the three locations where an artist sold the most concert tickets in 2023. 

Spotify for Artists Associate Brand Marketing Director Rob Fink

Last year’s Wrapped resulted in Spotify’s biggest merch sales week to date. How did Spotify incorporate those learnings into 2023 Wrapped?

Beyond connecting with their top fans, we want Wrapped to be a moment for artists to earn additional revenue as well. And one big thing we’ve learned is that when artists create unique merch offers on Spotify, those tend to outperform the rest.

That’s why this year, for the first time ever, we enabled artists [in the U.S. and Canada] to set up Wrapped-specific merch discounts for their top listeners of the year. We want artists to be able to offer fans something special, and in turn, fans will know they’re receiving a discount for being a top listener.

We’ve also made artists’ merch and ticket offers even more visible by adding them to more places within fans’ Wrapped experience. Listeners will receive personalized offers from their top artists when they open Wrapped, and we’ll also continue to promote those offers via in-app messaging, emails, and beyond after Wrapped launches to make sure fans don’t miss out. 

We also can’t forget about the songwriters and producers out there. What can they expect from their Wrapped this year?

Last year, we sent personalized share cards to all songwriters and producers who have active Written By playlists or Songwriter Pages on Spotify. This group has grown substantially since, and this year we’re introducing a dedicated Songwriter Wrapped microsite experience. We’re excited to continue making Wrapped even exciting for this extremely important audience.

We’re also testing out a new idea and launching a Songwriter Wrapped social campaign to show love to the music makers—regardless of whether they have a Written By playlist on Spotify yet. Artists and music fans alike can fill in the blanks on their favorite songwriters, producers, lyrics, and beats from 2023 to acknowledge and celebrate the creativity and work from their top creators.

Is there anything else you’ve been keeping under wraps?

We’re testing something this year that we’re calling Wrapped Listening Parties. We’ve teamed up with a small handful of artists who will host invite-only live audio rooms for top fans where everyone can interact and listen to music together. Artists will also be able to promote their merch offers there as well. The idea is to put our listening data to good use and offer unique ways for artists and fans to connect on a personal level.

Ready to check out your Artist Wrapped? Head over to Spotify for Artists to get started.

Head of Songwriter and Publishing Relations Jules Parker Explains How Spotify Is Bringing Behind-the-Scenes Creators Into the Spotlight

July 8, 2020

Recently, we announced the release of a beta version of songwriter pages and “Written By” playlists, which helps fans, collaborators, and industry partners dive deeper into some of the creators behind their favorite songs. For songwriters, it serves as a new way to share the songs they’ve written on Spotify and get discovered by potential collaborators and fans. As part of that beta, today, we’re unveiling additional pages and playlists from a wide array of incredible songwriters. 

Jules Parker, Spotify’s Head of Songwriter and Publishing Relations, is heading up a new team across Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and London focused on expanding our support of songwriters and publishers all over the world. A former songwriter as well as the owner of a songwriter and artist management company, Jules not only understands the tools used in music creation, but he also appreciates the difficulty of the job—and why it’s so important to recognize the work put in behind the scenes. 

We spoke to Jules about his team’s work. Read on to learn more about the world of music publishing and how Spotify’s new songwriter pages are helping connect songwriters, publishers, artists, and fans.

Say you’re a songwriter who’s penned a tune and needs someone to sing it. What’s the process for approaching an artist or getting one to find you, and how does Spotify play into that?

There’s a long-standing perception of a solo songwriter pitching their songs to other people. This can happen—and of course, many artists write and record their own songs—but the reality today is that you generally get in a room with an artist and write a song together, then and there. (Or alternatively, you’ll swap tracks and toplines over email and write the song virtually—all too common these days). So it’s all about networking and collaborating—and that’s where publishers come in. A publisher looks to connect artists with songwriters and other creative opportunities. Plus, these days there are even more opportunities for songwriters to transition to also be successful recording artists—like Julia Michaels, Benny Blanco, and more.

At Spotify, we’re now giving publishers and writers more ways to help unlock opportunities via analytic and songwriter tools. These will, long term, help support both up-and-coming and established writers because they’ll have more information, leading to better connections and networks. Through our Publishing Analytics, publishers and teams can access next-day song and writer stats based on accurate data, and through our songwriting camps and free-to-use studio spaces, writers and artists can pair up to create something new.

Can you tell us a little more about the tools and opportunities Spotify has for songwriters and publishers?

First, we created a home for songwriters with the songwriter page on Spotify. It’s a pilot program—just the start of how we can help songwriters further build their identity and showcase what they’ve done. We’ve also created Written By playlists, which are featured on these pages. We’re working on rolling them out to more and more writers—and just unveiled some new ones today—but they’re a great way for fans to get to know the work of a specific songwriter.

We’ve also been hosting songwriting camps for artists around playlists, genres, or specific artist projects. We’ve done ones around Who We Be, The Most Beautiful Songs in the World, and Butter. Through these camps, we’re providing the opportunity for collaboration in creating great songs that may appear on our flagship playlists or perhaps earn a Grammy nomination. (Here’s looking at Grammy-winning “a lot” by 21 Savage, which was created at a Spotify songwriting camp run by our Atlanta-based Head of Songwriter Relations Paris Kirk).

Finally, we have writing studios that songwriters or publishers can book in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Toronto, and London free of charge. We invite songwriters to use these as a place to collaborate and create songs. We’re constantly evolving this project and expanding access to it, and we hope to set up new locations in the future. 

Why is Spotify investing in these projects and tools? 

Supporting songwriters and publishers helps them be able to do what they do best: create and promote the music you love. Your favorite songs begin with songwriters, so the more opportunities we can provide, the better we can help them create that next hit, and the more reasons you have to stream their music. 

Songwriters and publishers are vital parts of the music industry, though what they do is less publicly known, so they often don’t have the visibility they deserve. But we can help with that, because Spotify has a unique ability to drive discovery. Since we began publicly displaying song credits on Spotify in 2018, we’ve seen a 60% increase in how often labels and distributors credit songwriters on their new releases, allowing artists and fans to dig deeper and recognize the work behind the scenes. Now, with the addition of more detail from publishers, we’ve been able to go further in recognizing those behind the songs. 

With the expansion of songwriter pages we’re continuing to evolve how music is discovered, appreciated, and enjoyed by the world. Supporting publishers and songwriters goes hand in hand with artist discovery. People know who an artist is. They don’t know who the writers are, necessarily. If we can help make those connections, we help people discover new music and open up potential career opportunities for the songwriter. It all ties back to our mission of helping creators live off their work.

I was actually just listening to Mark Ronson’s Written By playlist and I discovered new tracks that I didn’t know he had written. I then discovered new artists because of a songwriter I love. It goes both ways. We’re exposing those connections that are not always visible but so important.

These new features enable fans to discover new things about the music they love. What are one or two of your favorite songwriting fun facts?

I think that a lot of people know that Prince wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U,” but loads of people don’t know that he also wrote “Manic Monday.”

There’s also a great Revisionist History podcast episode around the song “Hallelujah.” It was written by Leonard Cohen but only became the standard for ballads more recently, after people like Jeff Buckley started recording it in different ways. Now everyone knows it—thanks to the covers—which shows how the versions of it can take it in completely different directions.

Discover songwriters for yourself starting with Shungudzo Kuyimba’s Written By playlist