How Spotify Uses Data Science to Score Music

The music industry changed a lot after Spotify and similar streaming services launched their products. We were downloading tracks, categorising them, updating ID tag’s of each song before that moment. The technology evolved, music technology did not stop, every song has math behind it, so Spotify used it to categorise songs with the below parameters.

• Song Popularity
• Artist Popularity
• Danceability
• Energy
• Valence
• Acousticness
• Instrumentalness
• Liveness
• Speechiness

Spotify understands the chemistry of each song and understands each of its user’s music listening behaviours. As a result, Spotify knows if any listeners love to listen to mainstream songs or not, they enjoy listening to instrumental songs or not and checking each listening habits’ energy level. So, Spotify starts to product auto-generated content for each user. Let’s check Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, and see how Spotify generated this song’s data.

According to Spotify Data:

Audio features that Spotify gives Wish You Were Here the song is like the above visual. This is the only data Spotify checks. Spotify also keeps records of each song chemistry to personalise and localise content.

Here is another shot of how these metrics change for different songs.

• Song Key
• Song Tempo
• Song Mode
• Song Signature
• Song Score for each Country
• Song Loudness
• Song Date

Spotify also keeps records of each artist they have; the parameters are:

• Artist Popularity
• Artist Followers
• Artist Genres

So as a result, Spotify can:

• Recommend songs to anybody who likes, listens to a song.
• Create an artist based playlists.
• Create moody playlists.
• Create algorithmic playlists like sleep songs, viral songs etc.
• Create discover weekly playlists based on song chemistry you mostly listen to.
• Create Release Radar playlist, which is not so complex. They easily pick from the artist you like to listen to.

There are superb products generated from this data. I’ll share two of them.

Dubolt – Discover New Music

You can create new playlists in seconds with the help of Dubolt. First, type the name of the artist or a song you want to create a similar playlist. You can select popularity, energy level, mood to customise your playlist.

Dubolt Website 🔗

Create and save playlists for Spotify with your favourite artists and songs and customise however you want with Spotify song chemistry.

MusicalData.com – Understand Spotify Scoring Chemistry

Musical data is an interesting website that shows all the data Spotify keeps about a song and an artist.

Musical Data Website 🔗

Musicaldata.com helps you know the scoring algorithm of Spotify. Anyone can find every Spotify score data of each song and song chemistry.