riding for interns everywhere 🤝

Spotify Wrapped knows you better than you know yourself.

It calls you out on your most egregious guilty pleasures, packages them into a fun and colourful gift made just for you, making it impossible to resist the temptation to share it on Instagram. That’s why you’ve probably seen a lot of Pink Pilates Princess Catwalk Pop and Boujee Throwback R&B Hip Hop word salad stories this week.

This year was a cringier, Ai-er version of wrapped than we’re used to, but I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the 1500 people Spotify laid off this year, right? Right?

Anyway— since 2019, Spotify Wrapped has become a cultural phenomenon that's synonymous with the end of the year. It’s a gift that represents the completion of the playlist that soundtracked the last twelve months of our lives.

As marketers, one of the most important elements of our jobs is to authentically communicate a story that resonates. What could possibly resonate with a customer more than their own story, told to them through a sensory experience? Spotify Wrapped is the final boss of personalized marketing and community engagement.

For such a profoundly successful tactic, it would be easy to assume that Spotify Wrapped was created by a team of marketers sitting around a table.

But it wasn’t.

It was invented by an intern.

In 2019, Jewel Ham was working at Spotify as a design intern.

This is Jewel ^

On her last day, she presented her idea called Spotify #WrappedIn, a feature that provides users with a recap of their year in music. While they liked the idea, Jewel left Spotify HQ at 5PM that day and never returned.

Three years later, Spotify released their first iteration of Wrapped—and we all know how that went.

Many of us are led to believe that hierarchical structures in corporate environments are meritocracies, where the interns are firmly planted at the bottom for a reason.

Their ideas aren't taken seriously because they're not given the opportunity to be taken seriously. This system makes it easy to accept that interns are simply cheap labour—rarely paid anything close to a living wage, but often in insufficient stipends, like Jewel was provided at Spotify.

What is most audacious is that Spotify gave Jewel the opportunity to present her ideas, and sent her on her way, only to take the idea, change almost nothing about it, and deny that they ever stole it.

Yup—even to this day, Spotify denies that it stole Spotify Wrapped from Jewel.

For too long, interns have been easy to overlook, use as scapegoats, take advantage of, and steal ideas from. This is especially true for young Black women like Jewel Ham, whose ideas are often dismissed or appropriated. The situation is made all the more troubling when viewed through the lens of Spotify's leadership team, which is dominated by highly compensated white men - approximately $406M in combined annual salaries to give you a ballpark.

But this situation is also clear evidence that interns are capable of bringing groundbreaking ideas to the table.

That’s what every marketing team needs: a fresh perspective unencumbered by the limitations of the organizational status quo.

In other words, listen to your damn interns.

Give them a seat at the conference room table.

Give them credit and compensation for the work they do.

You might learn a lot from them.

We ride at dawn for Jewel, and for interns everywhere.

Riding for interns everywhere,

Ines Andersen

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