What challenges and opportunities do you anticipate for the company in the near term? It shows that once all of the metadata is extracted and analyzed, and previous requests, listening and rating history of the user and friends, new content is recommended. The figure above demonstrates this process. Information such as intonation, stress, rhythm, are used to label user’s speech as “happy, angry, afraid, sad or neutral”. The next step is to classify the user’s emotional state which, presumably, helps make a better instantaneous recommendation.įurthermore, the patent filing mentions another, more basic, approach of determining user emotion. This metadata helps determine attributes such as age, gender, accent, which can help indicate the user’s emotional state. More specifically, Spotify will be retrieving content metadata from the user’s voice and background noise. In January 2021, Spotify was granted a patent for speech recognition technology that would allow them to capture audio to more accurately identify the listener’s mood. What type of investments and process put that asset to use, and creates value for the company? However, I think that would be too much of a tall order. If Spotify can identify what specific musical attributes make a user like a particular song, their recommendation engine would reach completely new heights. Using CNN, Spotify analyzes raw audio data such as the song’s BPM, musical key, loudness, etc., to classify songs based on music type and further optimize its recommendation engine. Perhaps Spotify’s most impressive piece of engineering is its use of convolutional neural networks (CNN). If a user listened to a hit song before anyone else, they are issued with a Pioneer badge. For example, if a user’s playlists gained a number of new followers, they can be awarded with a Tastemaker badge. Spotify creatively encourages user engagement with “Wrapped” by issuing users with badges. This information is presented using data visualization to create a personalized story to all users. “Wrapped” also lets users know if they were in the leading 1% of an artist’s most loyal listeners. Every December, “Wrapped” gives users a roundup of their favourite or most listened to song/artist of the entire year. One of Spotify’s funnest feature is “Wrapped”. Not only has this created value for the users, by allowing them to discover new music, but it also allowed several artists to break into international markets. Within the first 5 years, Spotify users spent over 2.3 billion hours streaming “Discover Weekly” playlists.

Eventually, this became a “Discover Weekly” feature that provides users a personalized playlist every week composed of songs that the user has not heard and should align with the user’s taste. The core feature has been Spotify’s “Discover” feature, launched in 2012, which made new listening suggestions to users. Spotify has long been focused on improving user experience as much as they can, and with their increasing focus on podcast investment, it is reasonable to assume that we will see even more enhancement of user experience.īig data and data analytics has played a huge role in improving user experience.

Do spotify free users get wrapped