How Spotify Uses Machine Learning Models to Recommend You The Music You Like

In the early 2000s, Songza implemented a manual music recommendation system for its listeners, where a team of music experts and curators would create playlists. But these recommendations were not objective, as they were dependent on the personal taste of the curators. It was an average experience for listeners, with a fair share of hits and misses, because it was impossible to make a playlist which catered to the varied tastes of a diverse set of people. The technology and the data did not exist back then to build a playlist that would be personalised to the taste of each individual listener. Along came Spotify a few years later, offering a highly personalised weekly playlist called Discover Weekly that quickly became one of their flagship offerings.