Spotify Wrapped is for advertisers, too

If there’s one thing that’s a sure bet at the end of the year, it’s the promise of being read for filth by Spotify Wrapped—and that’s not just true for listeners, but the app’s advertisers, too.

This week, the audio streamer released its annual user data year-in-review alongside a version for advertisers, aptly called Wrapped for Advertisers, that contains information like total impressions, unique users, attention metrics, and total ad streaming minutes. This year, all advertisers that use Spotify Ads Manager will be able to access a Wrapped report on that platform, while an in-app review is reserved for select advertisers. Wrapped for Advertisers also reveals insights into advertisers’ target audience behaviors, like the music and podcast genres that were most popular within certain demographics.

It’s the fourth year brands have gotten some kind of a look back at advertising trends on Spotify, but only the second year of personalized Wrapped reports for individual advertisers on the platform.

Like its broader Wrapped feature for listeners, Spotify’s Wrapped for Advertisers is all about engagement, and is aimed at streamlining and increasing accessibility for the advertising experience, Bridget Evans, Spotify’s global head of advertising business marketing, told us. Last year, only select advertisers chosen for Wrapped had access to such insights.

In addition to the customized report, Spotify released its fourth advertising trends report at large, highlighting niche data points that could be useful to marketers, which Evans said she hoped would help inform brand brainstorming sessions for the new year.

“We’re providing these insights at scale for any brainstorm, and to really set up 2026 campaigns with a bit more insight into what audiences are thinking about, or the moods or the moments that they’re streaming,” she said.

With the wealth of data that Spotify has about its listeners, Evans said one of the top requests she gets from CMOs and media buyers is to distill that data into “nuggets” to inspire future campaigns. Below, some data highlights:

The right setting: US Spotify users this year were “67% more likely to stream in-car,” according to Spotify, and podcast streaming in a vehicle was up 186% compared to the global average. Meanwhile, the home setting saw increases too, with US users 53% more likely to stream on gaming consoles and 203% more likely to watch podcasts on those devices this year.

According to Evans, keeping the streaming setting in mind can not only help increase reach incrementality, but also potentially foster deeper connections with users.

“If you’re looking at your phone and you’re swiping past ad, ad, content, content…there’s this algorithmic fatigue, and you have a million ads coming your way,” she said. “If you’re in a car and you have Spotify streaming—that is what you’re hearing, that is what you’re listening to. In between the ads, you’re listening to your favorite artist or you’re learning something through a podcast, so there’s just more of an emotional connection and a higher level of engagement that we see happen.”

Feeling emo: Forty percent of the emo genre’s total global listenership came from the US this year, a trend that Evans said indicates a specific type of nostalgia that brands may want to tap into.

“When you think about different artist partnerships that a brand might want to enlist, or even just showing up in a way that’s relevant to reach people, [brands] can think about how the mindset of a lot of US Spotify streamers is very nostalgic right now,” she said.

Tell me something I don’t know: Podcast listening continues to be popular, and educational shows in particular found a larger audience this year, with science podcasts up 32% YoY and business and tech podcasts up 27% YoY.

“I personally listen to Mark Hyman’s podcast a lot,” Evans said. “Generally, you can imagine that any brand or advertiser that has some sort of learning value to offer might want to target those genres.”