SPOTIFY

Recommendations Teardown
Sidharth Sundaram
Overview
Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video
KEY STATS
service that gives its users access to millions

of songs and other content from creators all

Total Monthly Active

433M+
over the world Users

No. of artists 11M+

Mission Statement No. of songs 80M+

Spotify's mission is to unlock the potential of

human creativity —by giving a million

No. of podcasts 4.5M+
creative artists the opportunity to live off

their art and billions of fans the opportunity

No. of countries 184
to enjoy and be inspired by it. operating in
 Revenue Model
Spotify

Fee from premium subscribers Advertisments

Competitors

Apple Music Amazon Music YouTube Music

YouTube Music is a music

Apple Music is a music,

Amazon Music is a music

streaming service developed

audio and video streaming

streaming platform and online

by YouTube allowing users to

service developed by
music store operated by

browse through songs and

Apple Amazon.
music videos on YouTube
Provides 100M+ songs. Provides 100M+ songs
Provides 100M+ songs
Has spatial audio. Comes free with Amazon

Download content for you

Prime
based on your previous

listening history.
 How Spotify Recommendations Work
1. Collaborative Filtering
Users

User #1 User #2 User #3 User #4 ...... User #100M ...... User #400M

Song #1 0 20 0 42 23 4

Song #2 12 25 0 60 59 0

Song #3 30 560 0 501 690 0

Songs

Song #4 1 421 2 259 0 0

Song #50M 156 23 5 43 0 0

Song #65M
23 96 12 1575 1464 0

Song #80M 1495 0 10 124 146 1

User #4 and User #100M have very similar numbers in the songs they listened to. User #100M has

not heard song #4 and song #50M. So, Spotify can recommend these songs to user #100M. User

#4 and 100M have heard songs that #2 hasn't. So, #2 will get that song recommended.
How Spotify Recommendations Work
2. Spotify's Natural Language Processing

"Electronic House"

"Nostalgic" "Adoloscence"

Spotify gathers text associated with their songs to gather information about the song.
The text could be song titles, playlist descriptions, lyrics, song reviews, info on the internet etc.
Users that have listen to music that have similar words, would be recommended the song.
How Spotify Recommendations Work
3. Spotify's Sonic Profiles

Spotify gathers data based on each song.

This data is tempo, genre of music, BPM, the key, length etc.
It then recommends the song to other users who might have a similar liking.
Metrics

Minutes of

recommended

songs listened to
L1 L2
No. of
No. of

recommended
recommended songs

songs liked added to playlists

 THANK YOU!
NextLeap Product Teardown [5/8]

References:
Spotify’s Mathematical System For Determining Your Music Taste [Half As Interesting]
Parfait Tirage (Original Mix) by Paradis on Beatport
How Spotify Makes Money: Premium Services and Ad-Supported Services (investopedia.com)
Connect With Me!
Sidharth Sundaram

sidharth.substack.com

Say cheers when you connect ;)