Talk at Future Music Camp on April 28th about Spotify. The main two topics were the algorithms to generate music recommendations and some statistic about Spotify playlists and their impact on the streams and charts positions. More data on www.spotontrack.com

1. Spotify
Charts & playlists
Julien Mahin 28/04/2017

2. Hello!
I am Julien Mahin
Music lover and Software Engineer
julien@spotontrack.com
Disclaimer: I never worked at Spotify

3. Started in 2013
Tracker for Beatport
charts
www.bptoptracker.com

4. Started in 2016
Tracker for Spotify
charts and playlists
www.spotontrack.com

5. Coming soon
App to discover music in
a new way
www.listenblind.com

6. Agenda
Music Recommendation
Spotify Playlists

7. Music
recommendation
Algorithms and machine learning
1

14. Recommendation
approaches
▪ Editorial
▪ Algorithmic
▫ Content-based
▫ Collaborative

15. Collaborative filtering
▪ Find patterns from user’s past
behaviour
▪ Domain independent
▪ Scalable

16. Challenge of Spotify
▪ 30M songs
▪ 2B playlists
▪ 100M users
▪ 1B plays per day
▪ 30 TB of logs generated every day

17. Collaborative filtering
David Guetta Lost Frequencies Alan Walker Zedd
James Listened Listened
Anna Listened Listened Listened
Paul Listened Listened Listened Listened
Thomas Listened

18. Collaborative filtering
David Guetta Lost Frequencies Alan Walker Zedd
James Listened Listened
Anna Listened Listened Listened
Paul Listened Listened Listened Listened
Thomas Listened Suggest

19. Cold start
▪ New users
▪ New tracks

20. Beats
Melody
Frequencies
Loudness
Voices
Chords
Instruments

21. Beats
Melody
Frequencies
Loudness
Voices
Chords
Instruments
Mood
Popularity
Region
Genre

22. Other parameters
▪ Thumbs up/down
▪ Skipped the track
▪ Listened to more than 30 seconds
▪ Listened to the track after a search or
because it was in a playlist
▪ ...

23. Spotify Playlists
2 Data from the 700k playlists tracked
on Spot On Track

24. 3 Categories
▪ Official Spotify playlists
▪ Playlists from majors (Filtr, Digster, Topsify)
▪ Others

26. Top 100 playlists
▪ 96 / 100 from official Spotify accounts
▪ From 14M to 950k followers
▪ 52 / 100 updated at least once a week

27. June 2016: 8M followers
April 2017: 14M followers
15k new followers per day
June 2016: 900k followers
April 2017: 1.2M followers
5k new followers on Thursday/Friday
Stable the rest of the week

28. Spotify Filtr Digster Topsify
Playlists 10 k 3.2 k 1.6 k 1.7 k
Total followers 500 M 40 M 19 M 13 M
Max followers 14.4 M 1.2 M 670 k 729 k
Updated at least once a week 3 k (30%) 500 (15%) 400 (25%) 300 (17%)
Average size 57 65 63 67
Ratio of tracks in the charts 22% 26% 34% 30%

29. Martin Garrix & Bebe Rexha
In The Name Of Love

30. Martin Garrix & Bebe Rexha
In The Name Of Love

31. Little Mix
Touch

32. Little Mix
Touch

33. Bebe Rexha
I Got You

34. Bebe Rexha
I Got You

35. Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj
Side To Side

36. Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj
Side To Side

37. THANKS!
julien@spotontrack.com