The FOMO effect: Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

Are you having a “powerful social media pop” afternoon? Perhaps a “writer nature” morning, or maybe a “’90s rave rainforest” late night?

Those categories are all courtesy of Spotify’s Daylist feature, customized playlists that are populated with automatically generated recommendations based on the type of music a user typically listens to during a given day or time. The feature, which rolled out last year, has quickly become not just a meme, but a marketing tool for the streaming giant.

“The playlist itself is really awesome and fun, but then it was also designed to really celebrate your own unique musical identity, and it was designed in a way that’s really easy to share and express yourself,” Emily Galloway, head of product design for Spotify’s personalization team, told Marketing Brew.

Take a chill pill

Spotify builds users’ Daylists by analyzing users’ listening habits, Galloway said, and behind the scenes, Spotify’s data scientists and music editors help select the words and phrases used to describe users’ listening moods. Users’ Daylists update three times a day: morning, afternoon, and evening.

Some popular terms referenced in Daylists include “chill” and “nostalgia” in the morning, and “main character” and “laid back” in the afternoon, according to data Spotify shared with Marketing Brew. For the evening, “missing you” and “lit” are among popular descriptors for generated playlists.

The feature, which was developed during an annual employee hack week at Spotify, is one of many ways the company is focused on emphasizing personalization, Galloway said; in internal surveys, she said, 81% of Spotify users cited personalization as the thing they like the most about Spotify.

Trendsetter

It may be no surprise, then, that Spotify’s personalization features get a lot of attention in the brand’s marketing efforts.

Daylists are now prominently featured in some of the brand’s marketing efforts, including organic and paid influencer content and through elevating user-generated posts about Daylists from social media, Spotify’s senior director of global marketing, Matthew Luhks, told Marketing Brew.

Spotify also utilized a global OOH campaign across “tastemaker” cities like New York, LA, Miami, and Toronto to promote Daylists, Luhks said, including billboards that generate Daylists mirroring the music tastes of the cities in which they appear and feature different recommendations throughout the day, like user Daylists do. That has included an ad campaign around Valentine’s Day featuring Daylists like “soul-crushing breakup afternoon.” In New York, Daylist advertising has included phrases like “subzero hip-hop morning” and “situationship blues” at night, Luhks told us.

The more people that use personalized features, like Daylists, the less likely they are to leave the service, Luhks said.

“People that do use features like Daylist tend to be more loyal to Spotify,” he said. “Then for those that aren’t on Spotify, it does create a bit of FOMO. People see their friends having fun with Daylist and they want to get in on the action too. So it does help bring people to Spotify’s platform.”

Pass the torch

Daylist is the latest of several personalization features Spotify has rolled out after raising prices on its subscription options last summer and expanding into audiobooks and podcasts. Spotify Wrapped, a feature analyzing users’ annual listening trends, has morphed into an annual meme frenzy of its own. Last year, Spotify augmented Wrapped with “sound town”, which matches users with geographic locations that had similar listening trends based on their music preferences of that year, and somewhat inexplicably tied many users to Burlington, Vermont.

Last year, Spotify rolled out Blend Playlists, a feature allowing two users to create a joint playlist and receive scores comparing both users’ tastes, as well as a more recent feature, Song Psychic, which provides recommendations based on users’ answers to prompts about topics like love, career, and school.

Spotify has previously put some marketing muscle behind personalized features like Wrapped, including billboards across several cities hinting at 2023’s top artist, Taylor Swift. It’s also leaned into experiential activations for Wrapped, including a lie-detector activation in Atlanta to promote the 2023 song “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” by PinkPantheress and Ice Spice. Spotify also debuted a “Lil Yacht” to celebrate rapper Lil Yachty’s 2023 album Let’s Start Here.

But resonant marketing messages also come from Spotify users themselves, who often reliably share their own reactions to Spotify’s personalized playlists and features.

“With all of these features, really, the goal is to get out of the way and show these innovations to the world, and when we [do that], when we put them in the hands of our users, they take it and run with it—they make it their own story,” Luhks said. “And when we see that behavior, that’s when we know we have a really successful effort on our hands.”