Yesterday I attended Spotify's Big Data & Machine Learning panel at Galvanize in NYC. Going in I had a few select questions, mainly why my #1 song on my 2016 Year in Review was "Venus" by Lady Gaga, despite all the times I set it to Private Mode for my ritualistic guilty pleasure listening sessions. More importantly than that, I came to learn how big data and machine learning are used by the engineers over at Spotify. With over 100M registered users worldwide, Spotify has many unique data and AI challenges. There's 25 billion data points within Spotify's database, 100 million music preferences to catalog and cater to, over 30M songs, and 2 billion playlists across 60 countries.

In an effort to make its mountains of data available to musicians and their managers, Spotify just launched the Spotify for Artists app that provides mobile access to analytics--everything from which playlists are generating new fans to how many streams they are getting overall. Think Google Analytics for musicians. It was originally launched in a web version earlier this year, but the mobile app allows musicians to access the info from the tour bus and the geographic streaming data can be instrumental to musicians and their teams to plan tours more effectively. Artists also have more control over their presence on Spotify including selecting the "artist's pick," and they can update their bios and post playlists.

Spotify, the largest on-demand music service in the world, has a history of pushing technological boundaries and using big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive success. The digital music company with more than 100 million users has been busy this year enhancing its service and tech capabilities through several acquisitions. Industry watch dogs predict the company will launch an IPO in 2018. When you have tens of millions of people listening to music every minute of the day, you have access to an extraordinary amount of intel that includes what songs get the most play time, to where listeners are tuning in from and even what device they are using to access the service. There's no doubt Spotify is a data-driven company and it uses the data in every part of the organization to drive decisions.