“Your 2017 Wrapped” invited Spotify users to relive the way they listened in 2017—collecting personalized playlists and making 2018 Goals along the way. The experience challenged them to guess who their top artists and songs were, revealed their true “musical age”, and used data about song skipping to reflect on their attention span. The real moment of truth came at the end—when they had to choose if they would share their data on social media.

Data was everything—but getting stable access and serving up dynamic personal data was challenging. WebGL and device-optimized CSS transitions created a seamless, energetic flow of animation—while on the backend, personal listening data was pulled from a custom Spotify API. Despite traffic reaching up to 10,000 requests per second, no downtime was experienced during the entire length of the campaign.

The results exceeded even the boldest expectations. Over 20 million unique consumers visited the site, and over 5 million shared the experience to their social network. The impact online was so significant that channels such as Comedy Central started to parody the data sharing experience. The personalized playlist featured on the site went on to drive over 2 billion streams.