Spotify

A.I.
IN SPOTIFY
HARNEHMAT KAUR, BANI KAUR,
AGAMJOT SINGH, DEVYANSH RAJ
SPOTIFY IS THE LARGEST ON-DEMAND MUSIC SERVICE APPLICATION
TODAY. THE FIRM HAS A RECORD OF PUSHING BOUNDARIES IN
TECHNOLOGY BY USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO ENHANCE
THE USER EXPERIENCE THROUGH NUANCED CUSTOMER DATA
INSIGHTS.
SO, WHAT ROLE DOES DATA PLAY IN

MUSIC STREAMING SUCCESS?
DATA - THE UNCOVERED
TREASURE
With tens of millions of users listening to music every
minute of the day, Spotify accumulates a mountain of
implicit customer data comprised of song preferences,
keyword preferences, playlist data, geographic location of
listeners, most used devices and more.
Data drives decisions across every department at Spotify.

This information is used to train algorithms which
extrapolate relevant insights both from content on the
platform and from online conversations about music and
artists, as well as from customer data, and use this to
enhance the user experience.
One example is ‘Discover Weekly’, which reached 40
million people in the first year it was introduced. Each
Monday individual users are presented with a
customised list of thirty songs. The recommended
playlist comprises tracks that user might have not heard
before, but the recommendations are generated based on
the user’s search history pattern and potential music
preference. Machine learning enables the
recommendations to improve over time. Not only does it
keep users returning, it also enables greater exposure for
artists who users may not search for organically.
IN ORDER TO MAKE BEST USE OF
ITS DATA, SPOTIFY USES THESE
3 MODELS OF A.I.
COLLABORATIVE
FILTERING
This involves comparing a user’s behavioural trends with those

of other users. Content streaming platform Netflix similarly
adopts collaborative filtering to power their recommendation
models, using viewers’ star-based movie ratings to create
recommendations for other similar users. While Spotify doesn’t
incorporate a rating system for songs, they do use implicit
feedback – like the number of times a user has played a
particular song, saved a song to their lists, or clicked on the
artist’s page upon listening to the song – to provide relevant
recommendations for other users that have been deemed
similar.
NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING (NLP)
NLP analyses human speech via text. Spotify’s AI scans a track’s
metadata, as well as blog posts and discussions about specific musicians,
and news articles about songs or artists on the internet. It looks at what
people are saying about certain artists or songs and the language being
used, and also which other artists and songs are being discussed alongside,
if at all, and identifies descriptive terms, noun phrases and other texts
associated with those songs or artists.
These keywords are then categorised into “cultural vectors” and “top
terms”. Each term has a relative importance in terms of how many times
an individual would attribute that term to a song or musician they like.
Spotify doesn’t have a fixed dictionary for this, but the system is able to
identify new music terms as and when they come up – not just in English,
but also in Latin-derived languages across cultures. Spam and non-music
related content is discarded through a filtering process.
AUDIO MODELS
Audio models are used to analyse data from raw audio

tracks and categorise songs accordingly. This helps the
platform to evaluate all songs to create recommendations,
regardless of coverage online. For instance, if there is a new
song released by a new artist on the platform, NLP models
might not pick up on it if coverage online and in social
media is low. By leveraging song data from audio models,
however, the collaborative filtering model will be able to
analyse the track and recommend it to similar users
alongside other more popular songs.
THUS, MACHINE LEARNING, FUELLED BOTH BY USER
DATA AND BY EXTERNAL DATA, HAS BECOME CORE
TO SPOTIFY’S OFFERING, HELPING ARTISTS TO
BETTER UNDERSTAND THEIR AUDIENCE AND REACH
AND TO GET DISCOVERED, WHILE HELPING SPOTIFY
REMAIN ON TOP OF THE MUSIC STREAMING SPACE
THROUGH A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR
CUSTOMER BASE AND PREDICTIVE
RECOMMENDATIONS THAT KEEP USERS COMING
BACK.

Spotify

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A.I.

SO, WHAT ROLE DOES DATA PLAY IN

Data drives decisions across every department at Spotify.

This involves comparing a user’s behavioural trends with those

Audio models are used to analyse data from raw audio

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