Listen Up

Blog Post Number 4, Big Data Case Study - Spotify

"Listen Up"

Blog Post Number 4, Big Data Case Study-

Spotify… the world’s biggest and most popular music streaming service, is using data to change the music industry. We saw music streaming become popular on things like “Pandora” but now Spotify is the king of music currently especially with millennials. With a student subscription offer, listeners can have unlimited music all month long with no ads for just 5.99. What beats that? Nothing. Spotify has almost every song you can think of with the exception of a few artists who do not put their music on Spotify i.e. Taylor Swift. Other than her there is pretty much every artist you can think of.  The music-streaming space has become incredibly competitive, employees at Spotify work hard to maintains its hold and grows its user base of 75 million users and 30 million paid subscribers. Of course there are competitors like apple music, tidal and a google music sharing platform, but Spotify remains in the lead.

How does Spotify Use Data?

Spotify is constantly monitoring daily trends on Facebook, Google, and other social channels.

Spotify uses Data to focus on storytelling. Rather than make up a story, they find it interesting to see data about actual people, and then tell it in a narrative that's interesting. Storytelling is how Spotify differentiates themselves from other music streaming platforms. It's not just people who are listening to music in silos, it's a big community. And by triangulating this data, you start to see trends and narratives. Spotify places a strong emphasis on personalization that other music streaming platforms do not do. “When we talk about personalized data, the idea is not to distill your habits and behavior to the most expected recommendations.”

Spotify collects a wide range of user data, but the most important is the listening data it collects from each user.

Each listen is collected in a user log, which is then used to target new music at the listeners based on their past interactions.

User listening data allows Spotify to feature particular artists in the recommended section of users who are statistically likely to be interested in them. As a result, an artist’s songs are streamed more often by users who will make repeated listens

Spotify uses data by using people who also like songs you like and see what else they're interested in, and deliver to you those recommendations. That allows you to feel like you're discovering and it'll resonate with you, but you may have never found it on your own. This leads to increased sharing of music.

Another data created feature is Spotify’s Discover Weekly function. It takes data about what you have been listening to, as well as what other users on the platform are listening to that’s similar, and aggregates it all to create a playlist for me each Monday. Spotify is taking data that indicates your tastes in music, merging it with data from other people with similar tastes, then coming up with customized playlists for me.

Spotify can also use the data it collects to analyze how its users react to certain changes: if they add a new feature and nobody uses it, they can get rid of it based on statistical evidence. All of this leads to a great user experience.

Another usage of music streaming data is on the artists end. Spotify is offering musical artists “dashboard” views with Fan Insights, which will give each artist a better understanding of their fans, according to an announcement on the company website for muscians.

A press release described how Spotify Fan Insights feature tells artists about their listeners’ demographic information where their listeners are, how the audience is evolving, how their fan base is listening and other music preferences they have. Artists have access to a dashboard where they can see this information that Spotify shares. Shane emphasizes that this could help artists plan their tours efficiently and to help artists recognize the super fans.

•   Who their listeners are

•   Where their audiences are globally, and how their listener bases are growing and changing

•   What musical preferences their fans have, and how they listen

•   How engaged and passionate various fans are, and differences in behavior

between casual and highly engaged listeners

Spotify strives to be entirely data driven. They are a company full of ambitious, highly intelligent, and highly opinionated people and yet as often as possible decisions are made using data. Decisions that cannot be made by data alone are meticulously tracked and fed back into the system so future decisions can be based off of it. So the conclusion is that Spotify relies on data whenever possible.  Spotify uses collected data to recommend songs to listeners that sound like the songs they like. This is an example of finding customer insights in the data to provide a personalized, relevant experience. Through all of this Spotify has created an amazing platform that’s delivers a great individualized experience.

http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference/spotify-connects-users/303299/?utm_source=digital_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage&ttl=1459872965

http://dottedmusic.com/2015/music-industry/spotify-big-data-and-the-future-of-music-streaming/