Spotify's catalog includes millions of music tracks and podcasts and has recently expanded to Audiobooks. Personalizing this content to users requires our algorithms to “understand” user preferences as well as content relationships across all content types...
Machine learning (ML) models are widely used on Spotify to provide users with a daily personalized listening experience.
TL;DR: Across a broad spectrum of product features, Spotify’s array of recommender systems play a pivotal role in tailoring personalized user experiences and helping creators grow.
We developed a Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) method to assist human curators in finding and correcting infrequent errors in a music catalog.
Every day, music is enjoyed, created, and discovered by billions of people around the globe – and yet, existing AI systems largely struggle to model the nuances that make music different from other forms of audio.
Existing spoken Language Identification (SLI) solutions focus on detecting languages from short audio clips. Podcast audio, on the other hand, poses peculiar challenges...
TL;DR: On online platforms such as Spotify, recommender systems are increasingly tasked with improving users’ long-term satisfaction...
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an established tool for sequential decision making. In this work, we apply RL to solve an automatic music playlist generation problem...
Answering causal questions with machine learning algorithms is a challenging yet critical task.
Quantifying cause and effect relationships is of fundamental importance in many fields, from medicine to economics. The gold standard solution to this problem is to conduct randomised controlled trials, or A/B tests.
Understanding cause and effect relationships in Spotify data to inform decision-making is crucial for best serving Spotify’s users and the company.
A new approach to calibrating recommendations to user interests. Users’ interests are multi-faceted and representing different aspects of users’ interest in their recommendations is an important factor for recommender systems....
TL;DR: Survival analysis provides a framework to reason about time-to-event data; at Spotify, for example, we use it to understand and predict the way users might engage with Spotify in the future. In this work, we bring temporal-difference learning, a central idea in reinforcement learning, to survival analysis. We develop a new algorithm that trains a survival model from sequential data by leveraging a temporal consistency condition, and show that it outperforms direct regression on observed outcomes......
Cutting-edge research in Machine Learning, Language Technologies, User Modeling, Audio Intelligence, Search and Recommender Systems are some of the key areas we feel incredibly enthusiastic about at Spotify...
There are many A/B tests we might like to run, but which are too technically challenging, risky in terms of user impact or even impossible to perform. For instance, in the classic example of whether smoking causes lung cancer, forcing a randomly selected group of people to smoke is unethical if we believe it might damage their health. In the context of technology companies, if we want to understand if app crashes cause users to churn, we would have to randomly select a subgroup of users and crash their apps on purpose – not something we would want to consider given we do not want to break their trust....
Dynamic topic modeling is a well established tool for capturing the temporal dynamics of the topics of a corpus....
What is Speaker Diarization? Speaker diarization is the process of logging the timestamps of when various speakers take turns to talk...
A large number of new podcasts are launched every month on Spotify and other online media platforms. In this work,... View Article
Here at Spotify, we are highly dedicated to cutting-edge research in various areas in Machine Learning, User Modeling, Personalization, and... View Article
Song lyrics make an important contribution to the musical experience, providing us with rich stories and messages that artists want... View Article
Music recommendation systems at Spotify are built on models of users and items. They often rely on past user interactions... View Article
Personalization services at Spotify rely on learning meaningful representations of tracks and users to surface apt recommendations to users in... View Article
Machine learning practitioners regularly have to select the best model to deploy in production. At Spotify, for instance, we might... View Article
At Spotify, we invest into designing recommendation algorithms that allow users to explore the music space more effectively. Recent findings... View Article