The Algorithm behind Spotify

A best friend is a person who knows you inside out and sometimes, more than what you know about yourself. Imagine having a personal music buddy who is aware of all your moods, habits, and choices without you even opening up to someone or something- that’s what Spotify is for you.

Spotify and its 150 million subscribers

This February, Spotify has crossed 150 million subscribers and is adding more to the family with each day passing by. The secret behind this marvellous success despite many other audio streaming and media service providers running the race is the long haul all through the years. “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal” is the technology behind the curtain. Unlike many other services, Spotify does not conduct a list of surveys and takes input from the user to interpret their music taste well, the tech and the special algorithm are the only ingredients of this service.

The technology patented by Spotify explains how it can tell if the user is jolly, angry, miserable, stressed, inert which are simply aided by the rhythm and tune of the user’s audio cancelling out the external environmental voices. “Power spectrum density of frequency at maximum power”, a feature of the patent, further adds determining the age, dialect, and speech style. All this information, eventually clubbed with the user’s music history and his contacts’ history helps the app give songs that the user can groove to.

Music, Podcasts, and much more

This Sweden company has over 345 million active users and 150 million premium subscribers, where the huge leap in numbers came from the ad-supported customers. Despite a minor fall in the revenue last year due to the concession in rates to engage new customers, Spotify continues to set to new ventures and come out with amazing results. Many famous audiobooks and recordings of celebrities reading public domains like Frankenstein, en Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave are a part of the new plan. 2.2 million podcasts having almost 25% of the total users are also a part of the major success of the service which not only lures in the newbies but also aid in retaining the present users. 

Recipe Of Success

The music streaming service which looks out not only for your moods but has also got your kids’ and pets’ mood covered, follows a special algorithm that makes it different from other services. Spotify wants to keep the latency (delay between searching song and listening to it) low and as a result, it checks either the user’s cache memory or some user’s proximate (who has the same taste as that of the user in music) cache for the song folder so that it doesn’t have to be re-downloaded.

The AI behind the algorithm is called Bandits for Recommendations as Treatments or BART. The more you listen, the smarter it gets. This “music buddy” comes up with a brand-new playlist of 30 songs every week called “Discover Weekly” which the user can vibe and shake-off to, as it matches the user’s taste magically! One of the models employed by it is “Collaborative Filtering” which simply goes into the customer’s contacts’ music history sharing the same choices in music and then recommends new music tracks.

The application can bring in new tracks tracking the user’s current habits and moods. Another model used on this streaming service is called “Natural Language Processing” wherein it digs up the entire web to search for the user’s song, the words associated with that music, language, the text of the song, and the other music artists and tracks being talked about with them and then eventually, comes up with the perfect playlist that the user could wish for.
So, to sum up, Spotify is ready with a huge playlist of romantic songs to make your Valentine Week special. But for those, whose proposal gets rejected, do not worry, Spotify got your back too! Happy coding!

Get the latest tech news and updates, ethical hacking tutorials and cybersecurity tips and tricks. Check out MeuSec for more.

Sometimes we include links to online retail stores and/or online campaigns. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.