Spotify's Listening Personalities

Spotify

When Spotify launched its annual Wrapped campaign for 2022, we were introduced to an exciting new feature - Listening Personalities. Using the past year's streaming data, Spotify have developed 16 personalties that summarise individuals' streaming habits, based on four binary attributes. 

The personalities take into account these attributes:

• F/E: Familiarity vs Exploration

• T/N: Timelessness vs Newness

• L/V: Loyalty vs Variety

• C/U: Commonality vs Uniqueness

In short, Spotify looked at whether listeners are listening to the same artists and songs on repeat, or venturing out into unknown territories, whether they're sticking to oldies but goldies, or hitting up new releases as soon as they drop, alongside the popularity of the music they're streaming. 

To characterise this information, Spotify normalised its streaming data, and each participating user was placed on one side of each of the four spectrums.The variables leave us with 16 personality types, each a neat little package that tells the story of Spotify users’ habits. 

Spotify's use of Listening Personalities has reminded us of the power of developing fan personas and segmenting audiences, based on their interaction with content. 

We are curious if Spotify will add these personality based segments to their existing advertising segments such as location, interest and genre. 

With the help of characterisations like Listening Personalities, artists could create tailored marketing approaches that take their audience's unique habits into consideration, creating more valuable results. 

Whether it’s committed vs casual fans or trend followers vs nostalgics, audience's listening habits are likely to influence how they interact with marketing content, so artists should be paying attention.

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