Spotify Uproar

Evan Pugh

When we think of Spotify, we think of a music streaming application that has become a household name that also competes with Apple Music and has gained over approximately 217 million monthly active users. Spotify has grown to become a great empire due to its user-based technology, great productivity, intriguing features, and user-friendly design.

Spotify was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006. By October 7, 2008, the streaming service publicly launched, however in the beginning users could only sign up for free by invite-only. Yes, the paid-for subscriptions were available since the launch, however, the company lost over $4.4 million in 2008 due to this private availability. As Spotify was coming up as a business, they started to realize their flaws and worked progressively to correct them in an efficient manner. By 2009, Spotify allowed users to sign up with a free account which was originally not an option for users in the United Kingdom. They continued to widen their market that same year as they provided the alternative to legally/illegally download music and they became present on the Apple App Store. As their market continued to rise, Spotify began to become one of the most well-known streaming services in the world. When people started to become aware of the power and growth of the service the investors started flooding in. By 2011, Spotify received its largest investment to date, totaling over $100 million that would be utilized to fund its commencement in the United States. Once Spotify hit the United States, the streaming service exploded. There was no looking back for Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. They knew they had created something special and we're about to make somewhat of a change in the music industry. With this being the case, the hired Sean Parker to gain and secure relationships with major record labels. Once record labels began to get in tune with this extraordinary service, Spotify took some of their settings to the next level. By 2015, they rebranded and updated themselves by including music videos and clips to the songs being played on the service. Spotify has now progressed into a service that has over twenty-five billion hours of songs available for people across the world. Now, let’s get into the ubiquitous computing of the service. Spotify has officially taken off!

Yes, the majority of people have heard about Spotify, but many people may not know exactly how it works. Spotify is unique and does work differently from the other music streaming services you are aware of due to the fact that it relies on several aspects to assure that your music is provided to you in the most efficient way possible. To begin, Spotify stores all of its music on servers, and when a user starts to play a song from the service there are steps in place for this to productively take place. A cache is a folder on one’s computer utilized to temporarily hold tracks that one has once previously listen to on Spotify. So, the first thing Spotify does is check to see if the song is already in the user’s cache. If the song happens to be in their cache, “Boom”, it begins to play out of the computer with no problem. Furthermore, the beautiful aspect regarding the cache system is that Spotify does not have to go through the process of redownloading the track, and when the cache becomes full, the old songs just become overwritten. If the song has not been played before, then the service begins to get the track from its servers. The interesting thing about Spotify is that there is another way the service can retrieve the music. Music can also be retrieved if other users nearby searched for similar versions of the song or if the song is stored in their personal cache. Therefore, Spotify has a few different ways of retrieving music for its users and it will utilize the option that can get the music the quickest at that moment. I believe this approach is superb and makes the streaming service so much more efficient and dependable than any other. I mean c’mon. In the grand scheme of things, your computer essentially becomes an equal individual in one gigantic cloud network of a myriad of other computers that have Spotify downloaded as well. This is so cool because the computers are able to communicate with one another by sending and receiving files based on similar song interests and clicks with other users nearby. This peer-to-peer (P2P) network is an outstanding way for Spotify to elevate themselves against other streaming services due to the quick reaction time between the users click and the music actually being played.

The next aspect of Spotify I would love to discuss is how user-based and how user friendly the service is. Users have described it as “scary” of how well Spotify knows their taste of music. In 2015, the service released a feature known as Discover Weekly. Discover Weekly is basically a playlist created by the streaming service consisting of 30 songs that the user may like based on the previous music they have listened to. Crazy, right? Yes, automated music recommendations have been used by others in the past, however, Spotify has utilized its technology to create a personalized playlist that has left many of their users in complete awe due to the fact of how spot-on the playlists actually are. Not only is this a great feature for the users, but settings like these put the streaming service at a great advantage over competitors. Now, let’s get into how Spotify does it. Many users have asked the same question, “How does Spotify have the ability to connect the dots between artists and listeners to create a playlist specifically for millions of users?”

The main source for these Discover Weekly playlists happens to be other people’s playlists. The streaming service starts by perceiving 2 billion playlists made by other users that can be used as a reflection of the tastes and sensibilities of the user. Not only does Spotify take notes from other user’s playlists, but they also consider Spotify’s organized playlist like RapCaviar. This is essential because the service uses a wide range of playlists to create a specific one for users. Using a professionally made playlists with millions of followers obviously holds more weight than using a random individual’s playlist when creating one’s Discovery Weekly playlist, so it is prominent that different playlists are taken into account. It does not stop there. Algorithms bring everything together. The data taken from the 2 billion playlists and one’s personal profile music is connected by Spotify’s algorithm. This algorithm was professionally created by Spotify engineers that use collaborative filtering and natural language processing to make everything work. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a process used by recommender systems and it has two senses, a narrow one and a more general one. Natural language processing (NLP) is basically an automatic manipulation of natural language by software. Furthermore, NLP refers to the way how humans interact with one another through speech and text. We see text every day through services such as Web Pages, SMS, and email, etc. Now, speech is self-explanatory. Speech is how humans interact during face-to-face interactions. Given the importance of these two aspects, NLP provides different methods and techniques to understand the reason behind the natural language. Spotify then puts all this together with software, Kafka, to work with the data in real-time.

Spotify has the ability to do many other user-based aspects and it is interesting to see how they further their actions in the future. The streaming service has taken ubicomp to the next level. They have the ability to change the music industry forever.

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