You're listening to one of your favorite Jazz songs. And the next song is of the same genre. Gone are the days of downloading your favorite songs. Personalized online streaming is the new thing and Spotify – the largest on-demand music service provider, was the first one to make this breakthrough. What made Spotify different from other music platforms? The company effectively leveraged technology, primarily big data to provide a personalized experience to each user. How Spotify uses Big Data? Let's know more about it
Spotify online player entered the music industry in 2008 with 24 million registered users (still counting). Having around 20 million songs in its database, they keep on adding 20 thousand new songs every day. That's quite impressive. With so much data, it makes sense to leverage big data tools and techniques to provide a high-quality user experience.
Spotify breathes data as for each decision they tend to use data. As the platform continues to procure data points, it is using data to train machines and algorithms to listen to music and provide insights that are useful for the experience of its users as well as its business.
Providing Personalized Content
If you already use the Spotify app, you already know what "Discover Weekly" is. If you don't, here's what you need to know. With all the data of users that Spotify has, the platform uses it to develop content unique for each user. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm0s help in giving this personalized experience.
Spotify launched the "Discover" feature in 2012 that basically created a playlist of the user's favorite artists. However, this feature matured over time with recommending more songs of a similar genre, after the playlist completed. That means, a user never had to search for more songs of a similar genre once all the songs on the playlist were played. It was served by Spotify automatically, using big data and artificial intelligence.
Currently, the showstopper of Spotify is its "Discover Weekly" feature that provides a personalized playlist every week aligned to the user's taste that includes songs that they have not heard before. The platform intends to give listeners something new to enjoy. Machine learning algorithms are used to determine which songs will be liked by the user.
Spotify "Wrapped"
One more example of how Spotify uses big data is its popular feature – Spotify "Wrapped". This feature is heavily used in December as it gives the users a roundup of their most favorite or listened to songs of the entire year.
Further, users will receive a report that states whether they make it in the leading 1% of say, an artist's most loyal followers. This feature not just uses big data analytics but carefully draws insights of each user to give them an encouraging experience.
Forecasting and Predictions
Spotify uses big data not just for personalized services and recommendations but also to engage users apart from music streaming. It uses big data for interesting activities on the app. For example, in 2013, Spotify harnessed streaming data to predict the Grammy Awards winners.
The platform was able to do this by taking into account data from various sources, such as user's listening preference, album and song streaming. This helped Spotify to gauge the popularity of the music. If you are wondering whether the predictions were accurate, 4 out of 6 predictions were perfectly accurate!
Targeted Ads
Besides music streaming, Spotify has been using data to create ads that precisely target users. For example, its display ad, which ran Williamsburg, New York, triggered an extended existing marketing campaign for Spotify. Again here, the platform compiled the listening history of users.
Some of the popular ad campaigns are meme-inspired advertisements. In 2019, Spotify ran a global ad campaign using the listening history of its users that created humorous advertisements to target potential users. Who wouldn't fall for something funny that immediately catches your attention?
Luigi
Spotify has built a workflow manager – Luigi, which the platform open-sourced. Luigi is a Python framework that takes care of data flow and execution. It is basically used to crunch a lot of big data to provide a rich experience to users. However, a lot of data is user-based like billions of log messages. This data helps to provide song recommendations for maybe choosing the next song on the radio. Further, this data is used to make predictions, decision-making and business analytics.
Spotify is one company that is evidently using big data in the form of user data and outside data to provide a long-lasting experience to users. With the ever-evolving technologies and analysis techniques, the data-driven user experience will always win because of its fantastic outcomes.