#SpotifyWrapped — using AI and ML is fun
How well do you want your music player to recommend you the next song based on your previously played songs? Wouldn’t it be amazing to get your favorite songs complied for you without your efforts! Well, Spotify does it for you.
Spotify is one of the largest on-demand music service providers in the world. The digital music company with more than 100 million users has been busy from the past few years, enhancing its service and tech capabilities through several acquisitions. Not only does Spotify have a wide range of songs and podcasts, but it also has the ability to serve its customers with crafted playlists. On top of that, Spotify Wrapped is trending from quite some time, wherein the listeners get to know their most played songs, their favorite artists and much more.
How does Spotify do it? The answer is simple — using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s take a deeper dive into the technologies and how Spotify leverages them to provide a fun experience to their subscribers.
Spotify and data
Spotify is a data-driven company. It has tens of millions of people listening to music from their mobile as well as web app. This allows them access to an extraordinary amount of intelligence, some of which includes what songs get the most play time, to where listeners are tuning in from, which artist is the most popular in what region and even what device they are using to access the service.
As the company collects this humongous dataset, it also trains machine learning algorithms to work on the data and extract insights that impact the business and their customers. It’s a win-win situation.
Apart from Spotify Wrapped, there are many such examples like Discover Weekly, Time Capsule, Daily Mix, etc., that enables users to enjoy different set of music. Each user gets a personalized playlist every day and week that is equivalent to a friend making a customized mix tape. This way Spotify stands out from the competition as no other music streaming platform offers such services the way they do it.
Why is #SpotifyWrapped trending
Spotify doesn’t only curate a playlist for you; multiple playlists rather, but it also tells your musical journey throughout the year. The storytelling approach that Spotify has adopted through big data, ML and AI is commendable. It certainly has created a hype among the users as they are seen sharing their screenshots on various social media platforms.
Spotify Wrapped is a feature that is heavily used in December as it gives its users a roundup of their most favorite or listened to songs and artists of the entire year. In 2021 especially, they designed this feature in a storytelling manner, making their customers the hero of their movie and giving them theme songs based on their most played ones. You can check out the making for Wrapped here:
If you are an avid Spotify user, you also must have gotten the Wrapped feature where you can see your top songs, top genres, how many minutes you spent on the app and many such attributes.
Spotify’s recommendation engines are powered by ML, big data analytics, collaborative filtering and many such technologies to understand user preferences. This allows the company to track customer data, analyze it and provide better solutions to their users. With Spotify Wrapped, they have upped their personalization game by also showing how much time users have spent on the app and comparing it with the other users from that geography.
#SpotifyWrapped for artists
Spotify has partnered with Shopify, the multinational e-commerce company, to give the artists on their platform insights on their data. Fans of a particular artist are sent an email link to shop from the artist’s merchandise store. Moreover, artists have also recorded a personalized message for their listeners. So, when a user plays a song from Spotify Wrapped playlist, they will hear the artist thanking them with a curated message.
Natural language processing and audio models
Spotify uses NLP to translate human inputs into a language that machines can understand. It also adopted AI-powered Spotify browsing including metadata of the tracks, latest artists and songs on the internet, discussion about musicians, news articles, etc. Whenever user enters a few letters or words of a song or artist, even if misspelled, Spotify recognizes the search term and shows results based on the songs or artists that you have listened to before. This helps Spotify to understand explicitly what everyone is discussing about — from songs to artists. It then selects descriptive terms, phrases and other associated texts to organize playlists for its users. Audio models are analyzed to evaluate data from the raw audio tracks and classify songs appropriately to present the listeners with recommendations for the next song.
Adopt ML like this champ did
In this new age of intelligence, Spotify is one of the few companies that dictates such a change in customer acquisition and retention by listening directly to their own customers. Their use of data at such granular levels has made them a force that inspires other companies to think on these lines and transform their business model.
If you are an organization that generates lots of data, you must utilize that data to gather insights on critical business operations. There are several use cases of ML and AI like recommendation engine, forecasting, clustering and more that you can leverage to make strategic decisions.
Spotify is one such example of how cleverly they draw their users’ attention for improved customer retention and gain new listeners and artists. You too can set a goal or identify a relevant use case and adopt these technologies to foster growth and achieve customer satisfaction.
