How Spotify uses Big Data and is killing it in the music streaming industry.

Welcome back to my blog!

This is an interesting topic for me to write about and I’m sure it’ll interest you too! 13 years ago, the term big data wasn’t even born yet until it was launched by O’Reilly Media and the concept is still evolving continually. But what is big data, first of all?

— Big Data is a phrase used to mean a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large it is difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques.

These Big Data are collected and gathered by people all the world, and that includes me and you! Basically, every click, like, comment, share and follow that you make on the internet are valuable information to businesses everywhere. To give you a better idea, I’d like to use Spotify to illustrate what big data is.

But some stats first! Spotify currently has a whopping 83 million number of active subscribers and 35+ million songs, as of June 2018. That is pretty amazing to me. I mean, they charge $4.99 ~ $9.99 a month and they got over 80 million people subscribed. I’m not good at math but I know that that is A LOT of money.

When millions of people are streaming and listening to music every minute of the day, you have access to an astonishing amount of intel. These intel include what songs get played the most, to where listeners are streaming from and even what kind of device they are using to access the app. Spotify is a data-driven company and it uses the data in every part of the organization to drive decisions.

One example is the Discover Weekly feature on the app that reached to 40 million people in its very first year. How this works is that every user gets a personalized playlist of music that they have not heard before—a modern-day version of a best friend creating a personalized mix tape!

Spotify also created the Spotify for Artists app that provides mobile access to analytics—everything from which playlists are generating new fans to how many streams they are getting overall. The geographic streaming data can be useful to musicians and their teams to plan tours more effectively. They can see which country to include in the tour list by looking at how many fans stream the artist’s music. For example, Halsey! I got to go to her concert in Singapore on October 8th. It was spectacular, by the way.

But sometimes, having and using people’s personal information can be a scary thought for consumers and companies must know where to draw the line and never cross. The community will respond if it feels like it’s taking too many liberties with data. I for one, do not mind my personalized playlists and yes, I do prefer Spotify over Apple Music so fight me! hahaha I’m kidding of course, I’d lose.

Leave a comment down below if you found my article enjoyable to read! Can’t wait to write more x