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Image by Napoleon Schwan from Pixabay

Each year in December, a grand phenomenon occurs online. Timelines are flooded with boldly colored slides, confessional text, and strangely detailed revelations about individuals’ innermost worlds: the song listened to most at 3 a.m., the artist who scored their break-ups, and the genre they didn’t even know was a genre until an algorithm told them so. Spotify’s Wrapped, released since 2016, has become less a product functionality and more a thesis statement on the internet’s enablement of self-analysis and a shared act of digital introspection. This is not just a story about the designers behind this internet phenomenon, but also about how their ideas took a type of basic music-listening analytics to what is arguably the most successful and resonant brand experience of the internet era. The most basic argument to be made regarding Spotify Wrapped is that, at its essence, it’s a remarkably simple process. It simply puts a user’s music activity together over the course of a calendar year and displays the results to them in a ‘story’ format.

The result that Jewel Ham and her team achieved, however, was something much, much more complex. They managed to make data human. They showed people who they were, or who they seemed to be, via sound. The extent of Wrapped’s culture is staggering. In 2024, Spotify claimed that it had more than 615 million monthly active users worldwide, including 236 million premium subscribers. Each year, come December, a major chunk of these users voluntarily make their Wrapped presentations go public, thereby transforming private use into public performance. In 2021, Spotify reported that its Wrapped had created "billions" of impressions on social media platforms in a matter of days after it was released, beating many conventional global advertisement campaigns. The point is that, as opposed to advertisement campaigns, where money is involved, users organically spread Wrapped as it, in turn, advertises them.

This is where the legacy of Jewel Ham shines through. Wrapped works because it taps into a key knowledge about online culture: the need for self-storytelling. In a time when identity is always being performed online, Spotify Wrapped is a prewritten story with substance, supported by data, and served with a healthy dose of humor and affirmation. The emotional appeal of Wrapped is not an accident. The psychology of digital behavior shows that users are more engaged with personalized content and that personalized feedback actually grows their engagement and loyalty. The Journal of Consumer Research published one such study, which found that users prefer more personalized digital experiences, since these experiences serve to “affirm individuality and existence.” The Spotify Wrapped campaign is a perfect example of this, one that makes users feel special and very interested, even though this same operation is happening to over a billion people at once.

Wrapped has also transformed the way in which the brand and the consumer interact. The normal way of marketing was for information to go one way. Wrapped turns this around, reflecting the user back at themselves. This is why it doesn't really feel like marketing. According to analysts who focus on marketing, Spotify doesn't actually spend much money advertising Wrapped but instead counts on the user to share it themselves through Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, and WhatsApp.

Jewel Ham's contribution, in terms of the impact of Wrapped on data design, is important, too. The arrival of the Wrapped app changed data aesthetics altogether with the incorporation of "bold fonts, animations, humor, or even irony." This might include the "acknowledgement that one is a fan of an artist ‘more than 98% of listeners,’ or that one should be classified as a practitioner of an obscure subgenre like 'Vapor Soul' or 'Bubblegrunge.'" Since Spotify Wrapped became popular, other services such as Apple Music, YouTube Music, or even those that are not music-related services but are in the same space, such as Duolingo and Goodreads, have started to include their own versions of year-end summaries. This can be seen as the “wrapped-ification” of digital products.

Wrapped also engages with a wider problematic of data ethics and the phenomenon of surveillance capitalism. It is noted, for instance, how Wrapped normalizes the tracking and celebration of individual data, potentially hiding issues of privacy. However, researchers observe how Wrapped succeeds exactly because it provides a benefit in return for the data, and those benefits include things like transparency, agency, and even joy.

The significance of Jewel Ham’s legacy should not be underestimated from the point of view of representation in the field of technology. The fact that the company profited from Ham’s vision and remained anonymous for so long is closely linked to the fact that, although women play a crucial role in building the cultural infrastructure, particularly women from ethnic minorities, they continue to remain invisible. The representation of Ham in media retrospectives has just begun.

The most intriguing thing about Spotify Wrapped is that “wrapped” offers a sort of digital yearbook experience. It’s a means by which one tracks the passing of time via an audio experience. Researchers have pointed out the linkage between music, memory, and emotion, and it’s just this linkage that Spotify takes advantage of by associating one’s personal experience with data points. The memory of a breakup, a daily commute, a year-long pandemic: all those things are encapsulated via a series of playlists and songs. On one level, Spotify Wrapped is an artifact of the culture that exposes the intersection of people's desires and people's expectations of technology. Jewel Ham's hidden legacy is its ability to show that size need not imply lack of humanity and that data can be treated in such a way that it is still human. While platforms are busy competing for shares, Spotify Wrapped reminds us that it is often the most subtle, least obtrusive digital experiences that are most potent, asking a simple question that resonates through all our personal frequencies: Do you see yourself in this? It’s a question that, thanks to Jewel Ham’s vision, answers are given to and shared by hundreds of millions each year.

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