Designing an Apple Music Recommendation Engine: A High-Quality System Architecture

Overview:

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

🎧 Ever wonder how Apple Music knows exactly what song to play next?
In this guide, I’ll break down how to build a real-time, scalable recommendation engine — just like Apple Music’s — using tools like Kafka, Spark, PyTorch, Redis, and FastAPI.

This isn’t theory. It’s a blueprint you can follow — with architecture, code snippets, and cloud cost estimates included.

In this article, we’ll design such a system from scratch, breaking it into digestible pieces, complete with code, diagrams, and cost estimates. Let’s dive in!

1.System Overview: What Makes Music Recommendations Work

High-Level Overview: How It Works