How Spotify Uses Location Based Data to Know What Tunes are Trending Globally

The media giant has been actively using location data to understand and cater to its 100 million users worldwide.

Location based data is usually used by businesses to track data that’s  being generated on a daily basis as these data are invaluable for enterprises in  analyzing market trends and taking actions accordingly. Like many businesses which run on a global scale and collect tonnes of data on a daily basis, Spotify decided to create a better way to analyze their data.

If you didn’t already know, Spotify is an award-winning digital music service which provides access to over 30 million tracks online. They’ve made discovering and sharing of music a whole lot easier  while ensuring artists get a fair deal. It is currently available in over 58 markets globally with more than 75 million active users and over 20 million paying  subscribers.

What Spotify wanted was a way to underscore the global reach of their brand while increasing brand awareness and driving more traffic to the platform and here’s how they did it.

Using Carto,  a platform that visualizes data, Spotify exported their internally collected data onto Carto to create a visualization that’s easy to navigate. They update the distinctive city playlists twice a month, each involving the analysis of approximately 20 billion listener/track relationships. This entire process does not involve the need for back-end developers or other specialists. By hovering over the map, pop-up windows display the name of the city and its corresponding top tracklist.  Elliot Van Buskirk from Spotify said “ I was surprised by how easy it was to create the map. It took only a few click and the learning curve was minimal.”

Spotify’s Musical Maps displays cities of the world in an interactive map that highlights playlists with top tracks specific to each city.
Source: Spotify Insights

This interactive map lets  listeners  browse an audio-graphic snapshot of the current favourite tunes, moods and trends that the rest of the  world is listening to and also lets them add these top songs to their own playlist.

With Musical Map, Spotify gained more visibility through social engagement. It generated more traffic to their website and increased user participation and brand awareness with over 3 million views. Buskrik said, “Our map’s popularity shows how curious people are about the music that is distinct to places around the world. These playlists have already been available but had never gone viral; putting them into a map format made them a global phenomenon.”

All Spotify needed was a Carto enterprise license to create a visualization to turn its data  into a global media sensation. Now it’s your turn to think about how your business could benefit from data-driven visualizations to generate awareness and traffic to your products and services.

Source: Carto

A Carto Partner based in Malaysia, Lava Protocols has a widespread clientele based in 7 other countries in the region.  We pride ourselves in not just being a Carto partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.