Big Data: Technology to enjoy music

In Mexico, 47.3 million people listen to music via streaming, and Big Data is becoming one of the allies of this industry. Custom online streaming is what's new and major competitors like Spotify are making the most of it. The days where we had to download our favorite songs are behind us, since with this, we have managed to determine our preferences so the following songs have a high probability of being to our liking.

Spotify effectively leveraged technology, primarily big data, to provide a personalized experience for each user. Let's see how Spotify uses Big Data.

Spotify's online service entered the music industry in 2008, currently already with 345 million registered users (and increasing) according to data from Statista and having about 40 million songs in its database, they continue to add 20 thousand new songs every day. That's really impressive and with such a amount of data, it makes sense to leverage Big Data tools and techniques to deliver a high-quality user experience.

Spotify breathes data, as for every decision, they tend to use data. As the platform continues to collect data points, it uses them to train models and algorithms to listen to music and provide useful information for its users ' experience and for its business.

If you are already one of the users of this platform, you have surely seen something called "Discover Weekly". If not, here's what you need to know. With all the user data Spotify has, the platform uses it to develop unique content for each user. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms help deliver this personalized experience.

A few years ago (2012), this company launched a feature called "Discover", where it basically created a playlist of the user's favorite artists. However, this feature matured over time by recommending more songs of a similar genre. That means a user never had to search for more songs of a similar genre once all the songs in the playlist were played.

Among the highlights recently, is its "Discover Weekly" feature, which provides a personalized playlist each week aligned with the user's taste where songs that have not been heard before are included. The platform aims to offer listeners something new to enjoy. Machine Learning algorithms are used to determine which songs the user will like.

Now Spotify uses Big Data not only for personalized services and recommendations, but also to engage users in interesting activities. For example, in 2013, Spotify leveraged streaming data to predict Grammy award winners with close to 70% accuracy. The platform was able to do this by taking into account data from various sources such as user listening preference, album and song streaming.