Spotify Wrapped taps fan banter to fuel its campaign

Spotify has released its 2025 Wrapped, marking the seventh edition of the annual data drop in India and signalling how listening behaviour continues to fragment across genres, creators and formats. The latest version expands Wrapped’s interactive layer and adds new analytical features aimed at keeping users inside the platform for longer, while reinforcing the company’s reliance on personalised experiences as a competitive differentiator in India’s crowded audio market.

Wrapped 2025 retains the visual storytelling format familiar to users globally, but introduces nearly a dozen new features. Spotify describes the rollout as “a bigger and bolder Wrapped experience that is more captivating, more layered, and more revealing than ever before.” Eligible users accessing Wrapped via the app can now control the speed of their personalised experience, revisit specific moments and explore refreshed classics like the Top Genres story, the Top Song Quiz and the Top Artist Sprint, which tracks month-by-month shifts in artist rankings.

New additions include Listening Age, a feature comparing users’ musical tastes against others in their age group, and a Top Albums story spotlighting repeat-worthy records for the first time. The platform has also introduced a Fan Leaderboard showing where listeners rank among global fans based on minutes streamed. A six-club system now groups users into listening communities according to behavioural patterns, while AI-powered snapshots in the Listening Archive highlight memorable streaming days. The most gamified addition is Wrapped Party, a live competitive feature allowing friends to play using their data—an attempt to extend Wrapped’s viral stickiness beyond personal summaries.

The data reveals predictable dominance at the top but interesting movement below it. Arijit Singh has retained his position as India’s most-streamed artist for the seventh straight year, followed by Pritam and Shreya Ghoshal. A.R. Rahman, Anirudh Ravichander, Sachin-Jigar, Alka Yagnik, Udit Narayan, Tanishk Bagchi and Masoom Sharma round out the top 10.

On the songs front, India’s fixation with romance has held firm. Raanjhan by Sachet-Parampara from Do Patti emerged as the most-streamed track of the year with more than 246 million streams. The rest of the list is heavily populated by love ballads, including Finding Her by Kushagra, Bharath and Saaheal; Saiyaara by Tanishk Bagchi, Faheem Abdullah, Arslan Nizami and Irshad Kamil; Sahiba by Aditya Rikhari; and Ishq by Faheem Abdullah, Rauhan Malik and Amir Ameer. Other high performers include Anuv Jain’s Jo Tum Mere Ho, Ishq Hai by the team of Anurag Saikia, Raj Shekhar and others; Apna Bana Le by Sachin-Jigar and Arijit Singh; Sahiba by Jasleen Royal, Stebin Ben, Priya Saraiya and Aditya Sharma; and A.R. Rahman’s Tere Bina with Chinmayi, Murtuza Khan and Qadir Khan.

Soundtracks again shaped album consumption. Saiyaara by Tanishk Bagchi ranked as the most-streamed album in India for 2025, followed by Aashiqui 2 by Mithoon. Completing the top ten were Animal by Manan Bhardwaj, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani by Pritam, Sanam Teri Kasam (OST) by Himesh Reshammiya, Lost;Found by Faheem Abdullah, Ek Villain by Mithoon, P-POP CULTURE and Making Memories by Karan Aujla, and Love Aaj Kal by Pritam.

Podcast listening continued its shift toward creator-led, personality-driven formats across genres. Figuring Out with Raj Shamani remained the most-streamed podcast of 2025, followed by The Horror Show by Khooni Monday and The Desi Crime Podcast. Other top performers included The Ranveer Show हिंदी, The Stories of Mahabharata, The Ranveer Show, Horror Time - Scary Stories in Hindi, SR PAY (True Crime Documentaries), Pretkotha (Bengali Horror Podcast) and Moment of Silence. Spotify noted that horror, true crime and self-help dominate India’s podcast charts, fuelled by consistent output from local creators.

This year’s Wrapped push has also been accompanied by a promotional film pairing Emraan Hashmi and Raghav Juyal, a duo that previously worked together in Aryan Khan’s The Ba**ds of Bollywood. The spot leans on their on-screen dynamic, with Juyal quipping at one point that “his PR team told him to keep things in control,” delivered in a tone reminiscent of the series’ understated humour. The promotional strategy reflects Spotify’s continued effort to blend cultural familiarity with product messaging during the annual campaign cycle.

Campaign’s take: Spotify is back with its annual cultural tentpole, and this year’s Wrapped India campaign plays a knowing wink straight to the fandom economy. The promo film opens in a velvet-lined VIP bubble with Emraan Hashmi lounging, only for Raghav Juyal to crash the mood announcing, ‘Wrapped has dropped’.

What follows is a volley of teasing callbacks to their Netflix series dynamic—half parasocial, half self-aware—crafted to land with viewers who enjoy their slightly clumsy, fast-talking rhythm. Hashmi’s tongue-in-cheek line about ‘India ke aadhe Gen Z’ (half of India’s Gen Z) being born to his Bollywood movie, Murder tracks is delivered with the same deadpan energy the duo built their screen chemistry on.

The Wrapped reveal arrives at the punchline: Juyal’s top song is Hashmi’s Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai, paired with a shirt plastered with Hashmi’s face. It’s a meta nod to fan obsession wrapped as campaign humour; precisely the sort of creative device designed to spark instant social circulation.

The film also neatly mirrors Spotify’s broader Wrapped 2025 theme: regional rise, mood-based loops and youth-driven discovery. With features like Fan Leaderboard, Wrapped Party and album spotlights turning listening data into entertainment, the platform is betting on habitual engagement over one-off spikes. As India leans harder into local creators and soundtrack-heavy streaming, Wrapped remains the annual barometer of how those shifts stack up. This is proof that user data now shapes not just recommendations but the cultural positioning of the product itself.