How Spotify Uses Your Data
On December 1st Spotify rolled out Spotify Wrapped which for those unfamiliar is a summary of your year of listening on Spotify. It’s like a year in review for your music taste. It gives a lot of data about you to you such as favorite artists, minutes listened, etc. This feature of Spotify takes in your listening data from the entire year and analyzes it and then puts it in a nice, easy to interact with, visual for you to see and share. However, experts are worried about the privacy of this, as Yakov Bart (a marketing and business administration teacher at Northeastern) put it “For any customer that cares about data privacy, Spotify Wrapped serves as an unfortunate reminder that anytime you interact with an app like Spotify, you’re sharing data about your preferences that can be used to send you ads or for other purposes.”
But that’s not the only way that Spotify is using your data, every week Spotify releases a “Discover Weekly” playlist of 30 songs to fans all across the world, which analyzes their listening profiles over the past week and in general and then recommends songs that they haven’t heard before and that Spotify thinks they would like based on what they are listening to right now. They do this by using convolutional neural networks (a Deep Learning algorithm that can take in an input and break it down based on a variety of factors and use those factors to distinguish different inputs from each other) to take in a song break it up based on its attributes such as the song’s BPM, musical key, loudness, etc. and then use those factors to compare songs to other songs. It then takes the songs with similar attributes that you haven’t heard before and puts them in a playlist of 30 songs for you every week.
Future Plans
Spotify also has future plans for your data, in January of 2021 it was granted a patent for speech recognition technology that would allow them to use the audio that the person listening to the music is making and then assign a mood to that listener. For example, if a certain person is listening to that song and is happy then Spotify can take note of that and use its convolutional neural networks to analyze that song and tell its algorithm that when this person listens to a song with about this tempo, musical key, BPM, and loudness, etc. they are happy. So, when Spotify gets the sense that you want to be happy they will play songs like that. This could enable Spotify to boost its retention tremendously as they are tailoring to the listener’s emotions.
This type of technology will not come without backlash though, Spotify hasn’t even released it yet and it already facing backlash, for example, some people are saying that this technology could be used to “manipulate the user’s emotions to encourage them to continue listening to content on the platform.” Spotify will have to navigate these problems to ensure the privacy of its users. Spotify is not alone in this field though, Amazon, through its fitness tracker Halo, “analyzes users’ vocal tone to evaluate how they’re coming off to other people.”
Conclusion
All in all, Spotify uses your data left and right to tailor your experience towards you, and they are not alone in that. They have always been a data-related company from everything from Wrapped, to Discover Weekly, to now trying to figure out their listeners’ emotions and tailor songs to that. They will face a lot of backlash as will other companies trying to do the same thing and will have to overcome that if they wish to implement their new technology. It will be interesting to see where the future takes us with the clash of privacy and comfort in regard to data.
Sources
- Chabot, Hillary. “Spotify Wrapped: Data-sharing Feels so Right.” News @ Northeastern, 4 Dec. 2021, news.northeastern.edu/2021/12/03/spotify-wrapped-data-sharing.
- “Spotify – How Data Is Used to Enhance Your Listening Experience.” Digital Innovation and Transformation, 27 Mar. 2022, d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/spotify-how-data-is-used-to-enhance-your-listening-experience.
- Saha, Sumit. “A Comprehensive Guide to Convolutional Neural Networks — the ELI5 Way.” Medium, 16 Nov. 2022, towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-convolutional-neural-networks-the-eli5-way-3bd2b1164a53.
- Walsh, Bryan. “Spotify Patents Tech to Recommend Songs Based on Users’ Speech, Emotion.” Axios, 30 Jan. 2021, www.axios.com/2021/01/30/spotify-patent-users-speech-recommend-music.