Case Study 3-2 - Big Data Analytics Helps Spotify Dominate Music Streaming Worldwide

Finance | Technology in Society | Application | Social and Ethical Issues

Spotify, the worlds largest on-demand music service provider, is a Swedish company that provides commercial music streaming, podcasts, and video services. As of the second quarter of 2021, Spotify had 365 million users, including 165 million paid subscribers worldwide. The platform includes more than 70 million tracks and more than 2.9 million podcast titles, which are available either for free or with an upgrade to Spotify Premium. The platform can be used with many devices and allows users to browse through a catalog of music licensed through multiple record labels. Users can also create and share playlists with other users.

The company effectively leverages information technology, including data-mining analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and particularly big data analytics, to provide a personalized experience to each user. The company uses big data analytics to achieve the following five goals:

Developing personalized contentBig data analytics enables Spotifys Discover feature to generate a playlist of songs released by popular artists, and it serves as a recommendation tool based on information the platform has gathered about a particular user. In addition, the Discover Weekly feature examines songs liked or disliked by users and the amount of time they spent listening to particular tracks. This information helps Spotify make recommendations.

Digitizing the taste of the userListeners daily preferred songs are incorporated into Spotifys Daily Mixes playlists, while their Release Radar and Discover features constantly refresh users playlists.

Enhancing marketing through targeted adsBy analyzing the users profile data, Spotify has been able to launch personalized advertising campaigns that have improved sales and engagement.

Continuously updating the platformBig data analytics has helped the company to improve the ease of use of its offerings based on feedback from users. Also, through mobile apps, artists can see the users engagement on the platform and enhance their offerings.

Implementing the Spotify Wrapped featureThis is a year-end report from Spotify that allows its users to share their musical tastes on social media. This feature has created more user engagement and has helped increase the number of users on the platform.

Answer the Following Questions:

How does Spotify recommend music to its listeners?

What is the function of the Discover feature on Spotifys platform?

What are the five goals that Spotify has achieved using big data analytics?