An Intern Created Spotify Wrapped and Spotify Never Acknowledged It
Whether you got caught listening to Sour on repeat (I listened to brutal 95 times this year) or had Certified Lover Boy on shuffle during your daily walks to class, Spotify Wrapped has become the newest ritual to round out each year. In the days following the release of Spotify Wrapped, Instagram and Twitter are flooded with people sharing what they listened to this past year, either poking fun at their “embarrassing” listening habits or showing off their “cool” playlists full of underground artists, like Tame Impala or Glass Animals. All in all, Spotify Wrapped is clearly a brilliant move done by Spotify… well not Spotify exactly, but rather a Spotify design intern: Jewel Ham.
On Wednesday, December 2nd, the day after the 2021 Spotify Wrapped came out, Jewel Ham tweeted she “really invented the spotify wrapped story concept as an intern project in 2019” and Spotify hadn’t “looked back since.” Included in the Twitter thread was a link to her intern presentation that includes graphics that look practically identical to the Spotify Wrapped format we’re all familiar with. Ham, who was a rising senior at Howard University at the time, created a project that revamped Spotify Wrapped which, when Spotify launched it in 2016, used to be just a playlist with your 100 most played songs in an email link.
Ham was tasked to help the company appeal to Gen-Z users and she presented the idea to make Spotify Wrapped more similar to Instagram or Snapchat stories to increase the ease that a user could share their results with others on social media. Refinery29 reached out to Spotify for comment who denied stealing Ham’s idea, claiming, “Since Spotify’s Wrapped concept was first introduced in 2013, hundreds of employees have contributed ideas and creative concepts that have made the experience what it is today. While ideas generated during Spotify’s internship program have on occasion informed campaigns and products, based on our internal review, that is not the case here with Spotify Wrapped. It’s unfortunate that things have been characterized otherwise.” Obviously, other influences were used in the creation of Spotify Wrapped, but it is hard to ignore the clear similarities between Spotify’s final product and Ham’s initial idea.
Ham, however, has taken this opportunity to highlight the exploitative nature of internships, especially internships for young creatives and content creators. Companies own the content created by interns and are able to use it however they like, even if they don’t pay their interns. Ham said herself “the problem here is not that Spotify stole my idea. It’s that I gave it to them.” Looking at Spotify Wrapped through the lens of intellectual property raises the question about what the purpose of an internship really is. Young, talented people are offered an opportunity to get their foot in the door, typically for little to no pay, and companies take advantage of the fact that many internship applicants don’t know how much their content is worth and rarely negotiate salaries or stipends.
Unpaid internships has been a hot button issue recently with many people debating the ethics of not paying interns and, ultimately, resulting in only financially well-off people being able to participate. Companies often offer college credit as compensation rather than money, which further excludes people who don’t attend a college or university. Financial status or whether or not you attend college should not preclude you from gaining career experience. But Ham’s situation brings up another major issue with internships: even if you are getting paid, the company you work for is able to take your work and make a lot of money off of it, while you receive barely enough money to get by.
As young creatives, we have to know what value our work has and demand more for the expertise and talent we provide. It’s long overdue for companies to start recognizing how integral interns are to their success and compensating them as such.
P.s. check out Jewel’s art work here!
By Marla Hiller
La Croix obsessed, coffee addicted, podcast fanatic.