Introduction
Spotify is a music provider company that provides music online. The users need to register to Spotify either by connecting it through facebook or by registering their e-mail id. There is a vast choice of music available that can be streamed to computer of any smart gadget in minutes. All the tracks are legally available and the music that is unauthorized to be broadcasted in a particular geographical region, it is eliminated through Digital Rights Management (DRM). The users can choose free tier or a Premium tier by paying around £3.19 and get music advertisement free and at a higher bit rate. The users can choose their preferences and set their privacy settings in order to guard whatever they share. The playlist chosen by the listeners can be made public or private depending on the kind of setting they choose. Spotify also comes with a live feed bar that flashes recommended music or the artists who are being followed by our friends on social networks. Even if it is not connected to the social sites, we can still search friends who enjoy the same music as us. Spotify App is available as well that can be downloaded on almost any platform and have unique features such as displaying lyrics or show what is trending on the charts.
Data Requirements in Spotify
Mostly the music players or music providers available online are similar. The user searched for some music, filtering it with respect to the singer’s name, genre, or album name. The music gets streamed on the user’s computer and is ready to be played. Technologically and from the point of view of the user, this method have some drawbacks. A high amount of internet data is consumed while the audio is streamed on the users’ side. There may be times when the music pauses or skips or it might get stopped in between. In case the users’ have a slow connection, this becomes more problematic. Spotify uses some tricks that can avoid the errors involved in the playback. It does not use its own computers or the internet bandwidth for sending the songs to millions of end users. It uses peer-to –peer (P2P) network for streaming of audios and works in a decentralized manner. When a song is selected by a user, the Spotify’s computer begins to send the data to the user’s computer immediately. At the same time, it looks for other users who are browsing music on Spotify. When the track is found that the Spotify software sends bits of the searched music to the user’s computer. This takes off a lot of load from the central servers as well as the Internet connection. Spotify does not make it public how much data has been acquired by the individual users in order to feed the Peer-to-Peer network, however, the lag in the internet speed of the users is not noticeable.
Apart from the peer-to-peer technology, it also uses another technique to play the music. This is the use of caches. Spotify caches or stores the selected music or song that has been listened by the user many times to the hard drive. This means, that that most searched or heard music by the user is played by his/her computer rather than Spotify itself. The size of this cache is adjustable. By default, it is set to 10 GB which is huge and can store a large number of tracks. This is an addition to the specific number of downloaded music by the Premium subscribers..
Hence, Spotify is a smart website and uses smart technologies for the ease of its users. It knows which tracks its users search the most and while a user is listening to his/her favorite track, Spotify preloads the subsequent track of the album as well so that there are no playback delays. The sourced music tracks are in Vorbis format. It is similar to the mp3 format and is compressed in order to make the transferred files smaller. Mostly the songs are streamed at the rate of 160 kilobits per second, however for the Premium users, a much higher speed of 320 kilobits per second is available for streaming.
Spotify requires the users to register themselves online in order to access the website for browsing through music and other audio files. The huge database of music available in Spotify’s server can be filtered by the name of the singer, album or name of the song/music. This key separates out the songs that matches the keywords and makes it easy for the user to look for the songs he/she is looking for. For premium services, such as no pop-up advertisements and high streaming speeds, the user needs to get a subscription and pay some nominal fee from £3.19 to £6.38 per month. This allows the user to have easier access and download facility for listening to the music offline as well. The Premium subscriber is recognized by Spotify software through an id key that separates out the user from the normal users and associated it to the services only available exclusively. The most searched tracks are also recognized by Spotify that the subscriber often listens to and it is cached on the user’s hard drive for fast playback. These tracks are also associated with the unique user id of the Premium subscriber and has other associated information such as the fee paid along with the date of validity of the subscription. Spotify is available for free to users as well but those in the free tier users have restrictions to use it on one computer per user or one gadget per user as well. They can listen to any music too however, they will have to watch the advertisements if they show up in between. The Spotify software is equipped to differentiate the free and premium users .
Spotify has enabled music lovers to enjoy the music of their choice legally and without piracy along with providing the musicians and artists with the royalty that they deserve through its paid service. Though free tier users may access any music or song of their choice, by paying a minimal monthly fee, they can get an ad free service and help in the generation of more royalty for the artists. The Premium subscription offered costs £6.38 a month which is a little more than the average cost of download £3.19 which every user spends on an average. This has raised a royalty revenue of £1.28 billion USD. This has been possible even though the users are much less in numbers as compared to radio, iTunes or Pandora. Spotify has been successful in the restoration of the value of music which was lost due to piracy in the past years. At present, Spotify has 50 million users worldwide wherein 37.5 million users use free service, while 12.5 million are the paid subscribers. There is room for more growth and more revenue generation in the future as Spotify is spreading to more number of countries increasing its user database.
Database Design at Spotify
Spotify has categorized its users into free tier and premium tier. The users in free tier can access the website through their computer or any other gadget by having just one user account. They can play the music only through shuffle mode and cannot play any music on their demand or offline. They can also not avoid the advertisements that come while streaming the music and have slower speed of streaming that is 120 kilobits per second. On the other hand, the subscribers who have paid for the premium service get more benefits over others. They can play music on demand and can also play the music offline by downloading it to their hard drives. Also, they get higher music streaming speed that is 320 kilobits per second .
All users need to register to Spotify in order to access music. When a user logs on to the website of Spotify, he/she is given a temporary id key through which the user is associated. This acts as the primary key of the user for recognition and lasts till the entire session of the user. If the user opts for a free subscription, then the user id is created associating it with the free tier user database. This also associates the system through which the user has logged on with the user so that a single user can access the website through that system. If the user pays for a Premium subscription, then a separate id key is generated and the user is associated with it. This primary key associated the user with the premium services he/she is entitles to enjoy. This key is then used for the functions like, sending the ad server information about not to send any advertisement when this particular user access any music and associating the high speed for streaming such as 320 kilobits per second.
When the user searched for any music or song it has to be typed in the search box that filters among the thousands of sounds in the index of the website. But first it checks if the name of the music of valid or not. If the name makes sense, then the name is matched and similar searches is also shown for the user to make a choice. Similar thing happens when the user searches for a particular artist’s name or genre. After the validity check of the name, it is seen if the song is present in the index and has a legal record label associated with it. After this the song is selected by the user and streaming is done. The streaming does not happen in the traditional way where a lot of bandwidth of the internet is consumed. Rather, peer-to-peer technology is used where other users’ system streaming the same song is accessed. None of the user details are publicized during this and the load on the central server is highly reduced. This also helps in reducing the bandwidth consumption by the company and saves a lot of money. The streamed songs are also stored in bits on the user’s hard disk. This technology is called cache. This allows faster streaming of the music when the user tried to listen to the same song again. The primary id of the user is also associated with the song he/she streams the most so that there are quick results. The music file is associated with another key which acts as the functional key with brings out the links of the other songs present in the album it belongs to so that the user can opt for other songs if needed. Similarly, the functional key that chooses the artist searched by the user associates other searched music results by the same artists by associating it with other functional keys so that the user can choose them if he wishes. These techniques makes Spotify user friendly and also helps the user to play songs offline though downloading. With the increasing number of users, Spotify will soon be able to directly provide the music through its servers directly without the use of peer-to-peer technology since it will be having a number of servers in each country to afford a larger bandwidth without any hassle and so there won’t be any dependency on peer systems of the network.
Bibliography
- Cetin, M., 2013. The Beginner's Guide to Spotify. [Online] Available at: http://mashable.com/2013/10/17/spotify-beginners-guide/[Accessed 2 December 2014].
- Chandler, N., n.d. How Spotify Works. [Online] Available at: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/audio-music/spotify3.htm[Accessed 2 December 2014].
- Dillet, R., 2014. Spotify Removes Peer-To-Peer Technology From Its Desktop Client. [Online] Available at: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-peer-technology-from-its-desktop-client/[Accessed 2 December 2014].
- Spotifyartists.com, n.d. How is Spotify contributing to the music business?. [Online] Available at: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/[Accessed 2 December 2014].
