In today’s world the majority of society utilizes social media. Being connected to a large number of people all around the globe goes hand in hand with sharing personal information about yourself. More and more people criticize the lack of privacy due to large amounts of data collected by services such as Facebook or Instagram. Nevertheless, I was recently thinking about that issue. It is not a secret that social media users are obliged to share personal information to a certain extent. However, the life users show on their platforms is often superficial. Hence, I was thinking about other services, such as Spotify, where the collection of personal information is less obvious compared to other social media services. Everyone with a passion for music knows that your taste in music can say a lot about yourself and your personality. Music can connect people, cultures but also impact someone’s sense of style and fashion. Further, the music we listen to often reflects our current state and mood. Nevertheless, people are less hesitant towards getting a Spotify description than creating a Facebook account considering privacy and data regulations. Now the question arises: Who knows me best?
In order to answer this question it is important to take a look at the techology behind Spotify. As most people know, Spotify is not only known for its wide range of music, but also its personalized features. Especially for its ‘Daily-Mix’ introduced in 2015, which is a playlist personalized to each users recent listenings and preferences.
To create this playlist, Spotify needs to extract information, by making use of three so-called recommendation models. The first model is known as collaborative filtering. You can visualize this as a huge matrix consisting of millions of vectors representing the amount of users by the amount of songs. Explained in everyday language, Spotify analyses your listening habits and matches them to similar users. Based on that the algorithm recommends you similar songs other users with a similar taste in music liked. The second model uses Natural Language Processing (NLP). In short, Spotify scans the web to look for articles, blog posts or discussions related to a specific song, artist or genre and connects them. This can also be done by scanning lyrics. To illustrate this, you can think of rap music. Many artists use similar terms. Also when speaking about rap music in ‘natural language’ users often communicate in a certain slang. By connection several dots, Spotify can detect similar music and make a connection between songs or artists. The most recent recommendation model introduced, analyses raw audio models. Spotify identified that the two previously described models put upcoming artists at a disadvantage. Hence in this last model, the raw audio is analyzed for Acousticness, Danceability, Energy, Instrumentalness, Liveness, Speechiness, Tempo, and Valence. Through that, Spotify recognizes similar songs and groups them together.
Overall, it seems like Spotify knows its users better than any other platform does. Spotify might even know more about us and our mental state than we do ourselves or want to admit to ourselves. Hence, it is questionable to distrust social media platforms but use Spotify without questioning it. Let me know in the comments how you feel about this!
Anderson, A., Maystre, L., Anderson, I., Mehrotra, R., & Lalmas, M. (2020). Algorithmic Effects on the Diversity of Consumption on Spotify. Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020. Published. https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380281
Ciocca, S. (2020, April 9). How Does Spotify Know You So Well? – Featured Stories. Medium. https://medium.com/s/story/spotifys-discover-weekly-how-machine-learning-finds-your-new-music-19a41ab76efe
Spotify. (2021). Web API Reference | Spotify for Developers. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/
Tiffany, K. (2018, February 5). You can now play with Spotify’s recommendation algorithm in your browser. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/5/16974194/spotify-recommendation-algorithm-playlist-hack-nelson
Hi Alexander,
Thanks for this nice blog on Spotify.
Very interesting to broaden the social media privacy issue broader than only Facebook and Instagram. I share your opinion that Spotify knows a lot about you through your taste of music. However, I think the data that platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have on you is broader and therefore also more in-depth. Furthermore, these platforms keep the knowledge that they have on you more private. As a result, we do not know what kind of predictions they can make with all the data they have. Nonetheless, the way Spotify uses the data is very pleasent and I think it is a very nice feature of them. Thanks again for your blog.
Kind regards,
Paulo Bos
Good afternoon Alexander,
I was really intrigued by your blog article since I am a very large user of Spotify myself, even listening as we speak.
The way you explained in plain language how spotify creates recommendations was very interesting to me and definitely worth reading.
I however have to agree with Paulo Bos, it seems that social media platforms have more sources of information (data) regarding a certain person which makes making predictions more reliable. I do not deny that Spotify would be able to make certain predictions about a person’s mood depending on the music they are listening but it seems unlikely to me that Spotify can make the same extent and precise predictions about people’s characteristics as Facebook can. Thus I would not say that we would have to ‘fear’ Spotify as much as ‘Facebook’.
Furthermore, music taste is something that is very specific to a person. Let’s say a person is a huge heavy-metal fan and only listens to this genre. What can be inferred from this? I personally think that, although related, that the type of music a person listens to at a moment in time is not a perfect reflection of their mood.
I also would like to add that in my opinion Spotify is much better with privacy in-between users. For example on Facebook you can see when a person comments or likes a certain message, see who his friends are etc. but on Spotify you cannot even see who is following your playlists. Moreover, on Spotify you can also easily disable the function that your followers can see to what music you are listening live.
I think that Spotify uses its data for a good cause which is making users discover music they like instead of exploiting them. However, you never know what they are really doing at tech companies of that size.
Interesting read and discussion thank you and have a nice day,
Rijck Dijksterhuis
Hello Alexander,
Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas on Spotify. I enjoyed reading your blog post.
Although Spotify states that they are committed to user privacy and try to provide transparency regarding their data collection procedures, in reality they offer poor privacy protection. The music platform uses the same surveillance capitalist business model as FaceBook and YouTube. Their end-customers are advertisers and not musicians and music listeners. The core activities of Spotify are therefore focused on gathering as much data as possible, and selling it to the advertisers who want to use the data to manipulate you into purchasing their products or services. By constantly tracking their users data, they are violating privacy. However, up to now they seem to get away with it..