How Did Spotify Get So Good At Machine Learning?

Daniel Ek, chief executive officer and co-founder of Spotify AB, gestures as he stands for a photograph after a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016. Spotify Ltd. is bringing its popular online music service to Japan, a large and lucrative market where fans have demonstrated a continuing fondness for CDs and even vinyl records. How did Spotify get so good at machine learning? Was machine learning important from the start, or did they catch up over time? I was at Spotify 2008–2015 and built up the machine learning team.