This they can do, but you can't change your display name unless you hook up with Facebook. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Account-Change-Username/idi-p/703799" rel="nofollow">https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Account-Change-U...</a>
Interesting. I wish it had more details as far as inputs/outputs, data sizes in different phases.<p>One thing that I wonder about is how much work could they do to collect this data on a forward moving basis. Often I see huge lookback jobs that answer predictable/static questions -- prime candidates for aggregation during ingest.
I thought this was such a marvel! However, my excitement level was tapered when I realized the playlist Best of the Decade was not created by only my music listening habits.<p>Seems as though users were pinned to some general playlist that had characteristics similar to listening habits? Still hats off from an engineering perspective. I as well wish there was more technical detail provided.<p>The year recap playlists though are fun personal snapshot of time.
Basically the perfect use case for cloud computing. Tons of compute for a short time. In this case there can’t possibly be people arguing for their own datacenter over cloud.
I'm curious how much data this involves per user. This is clearly a massive undertaking when you're talking about ~250 million users but I bet it would be easy to provide the same info if all the data was local on a device and each user ran their own query. This assumes that the space required to store all of your listening history fits on device which I think is a safe bet.
I'd recommend them to check out Clickhouse for exactly the same purposes. Works well for Cloudflare, Yandex, Sentry.<p>Another idea is to run probabilistic queries instead of exact ones, could bring down costs way more.
There's more info at <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/how-spotify-ran-the-largest-google-dataflow-job-ever-for-wrapped-2019/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/how-spotify-ran-the-larges...</a>.<p>(via <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359528" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359528</a>)
In early December, Spotify launched its annual personalized Wrapped playlist with its users’ most-streamed sounds of 2019. That has become a bit of a tradition and isn’t necessarily anything new, but for 2019, it also gave users a look back at how they used Spotify over the last decade. Because this was quite a large job, Spotify gave us a bit of a look under the covers of how it generated these lists for its ever-growing number of free and paid subscribers.
This may be a more appropriate source, from the source:<p><a href="https://labs.spotify.com/2019/11/12/spotifys-event-delivery-life-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://labs.spotify.com/2019/11/12/spotifys-event-delivery-...</a>
This is interesting, but what I actually find even more interesting than this is Spotify continuing it's usage of Google Cloud products even after being acquired by Microsoft. Can anyone shed some light as to why this is the case? Has that acquisition not been a "traditional" MS acquisition?