master thesis spotify

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What is the duration of summer internships @ Spotify?

For the summer of 2024, internships will last for 10 weeks, beginning June 10th and ending on August 16th.

What locations will interns be based in this summer?

For the summer of 2024, we’re only accepting interns who can join us in our offices in London, Stockholm and NYC. There is no option to participate in our Global Internship Program remotely this summer. To check the location for specific roles, have a look at the job descriptions.

What is the summer internship recruitment timeline?

Our 2024 internships are opening on February 29th and applications will remain open until March 15th. We will evaluate all candidates after our application deadlines. Our interview process will take place in March and April.

Who is eligible for the summer internship program?

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Do you accept applications that are received after the application deadline?

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Do I have to be referred by a Spotify employee to apply or be considered for an internship?

No, we make sure each candidate that applies gets full consideration in the process.

Can I apply for early career programming via email or LinkedIn messages?

We only accept applications via our official Spotify Jobs site. Please ensure you’ve submitted an application directly to an active posting.

Can I schedule an informational interview with a team member?

While we’d love to chat and meet the students who are passionate about joining Spotify, we are unfortunately unable to schedule pre-interview informational conversations. The best way to learn more is to submit your application officially, and be contacted via a recruiter.

Are summer internships rotational?

Our summer internships are not rotational. Rather, you are placed on one team which you will work with during the duration of your 10 weeks at Spotify.

Are Spotify internships paid?

How can I stand out in my application and in the interview process?

Firstly, do your research and let us know why you are interested in Joining the Band! While not required, we love to see cover letters, portfolios and personal websites in addition to your resume to give us a better sense of who you are, your experience and what you are passionate about! Pay close attention to our different job descriptions and apply to only the ones that you are interested in and that align with your background!

If I want to get data and information for my research, what do I do?

You can find publicly available data at any of the following sites:

• Developer.spotify.com
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• Research.spotify.com
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• Investors.spotify.com
• Spotifycodes.com

Can I interview someone from Spotify for my thesis?

Unfortunately, we are unable to schedule any interviews, share surveys across the company, or give out non-public information. There are however five different sites where you can get publicly available data and information from us where you can find out more about the topics you are interested in. You can find publicly available data at any of the following sites:

Can I write my (bachelor/master) thesis at Spotify?

Currently, we do not have a formal master thesis program. Should you connect with a team via your own networking that is interested in working with you on your thesis, we will consider your proposal and connect with you on next steps. Currently, we do not accept master thesis proposals via email or via our recruitment team.

I’m in high school - can I intern at Spotify (if only for a few days)?

Unfortunately, we do not currently offer any internships for high school students.

Can I / my school / my students / my org visit an Spotify office?

Due to a high volume of requests, we are not currently taking any requests for office tours/visits.

What do you do to promote Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging at Spotify?

Spotify’s committed to building a diverse workforce that is reflective of the creators, artists, and consumers on the platform. We aim to empower our teams to do their best work. You can read more here about our commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

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We’re thrilled you’re thinking of a career in our industry and are interested in all things Spotify. Whilst we’re not running any internships or programs for primary school or high school students right now, why not check out our Spotify for Developers site to learn more about our platform?

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Master's thesis – Spotify

Spotify forever changed the way we think of music when releasing their music streaming platform. Their huge success has inevitably lead to big competitors like Apple, Amazon and Google to step up their game and enter the fight for listeners. Being a fast-growing product company like Spotify, with a fleet of 250 (and counting) autonomous teams in an agile environment, means great potential in terms of what can be done. However, steering the vessel becomes trickier for each additional team and demands more from the organizational structure, as well as from the suite of technical solutions. The Platform Developer Experience tribe at the company, with an overall goal of providing the best possible conditions for these teams to perform well, suspects that this autonomous set-up creates bottlenecks, ultimately hindering the end-to-end productivity. This tribe wanted us to find and better understand these bottlenecks, and furthermore to design and present features of an enterprise software aiding in their elimination. What: User research / Product design     When: January 2020 - June 2020

Project preparation

The project started by talking to several stakeholders to understand their expectations and view on the project to be carried out. Given the limited time frame of the project and the expected deliverables from Spotify’s side, as well as from Chalmers, a time plan had to be mapped out, including internal deadlines making sure we progressed as planned. The idea was to go through a full design thinking cycle, with an etnographic lense guiding the chosen methods for each phase.

User research

In order to fully understand and to be able to map out the problem space of productivity blockers, a thorough data collection had to be done. Since the users and target group of our study was developers of Spotify, it meant we had to talk to them. A lot of them. This was done primarily through semi-structured interviews, contextual inquiries and focus groups. The latter was considered more fruitful since it allowed several users to elaborate on each others ideas and it opened up for additional perspectives of a given topic. An important aspect, initially expressed by Spotify, was to talk to a wide spectrum of developers; ranging in tenure, coming from different discplines and office sites.

Trip to Manhattan

To not risk capturing a new ”Stockholm syndrome”, we traveled across the Atlantic to Spotify's office site in New York. During our visit, we ran additional interviews, focus groups and guerrilla research sessions across the different floors in 4 World Trade Center. We also got the chance to present our initial findings to the Platform Developer Expeirence teams based in New York. This opened up the chance for them to give feedback and further feed our knowledge of the problem space.

Data collected from 49 different developers was transcribed and analysed using affinity diagramming and thematic analysis. Quotes addressing similar issues were clustered and themes started to emerge. To risk mitigating bringing biases to the table, this was done seperately between the two of us for the first few transcriptions. The results were then compared and a shared code book was created to use on the rest of the data. The larger themes were evaluated based on their predicted return of investment (ROI) and impact. After close discussions with the main stakeholders, it was decided to move forward with the problem of code exploration & evaluation – one of the sub-problems of the umbrella theme Discoverability .

Problem statement

Developers have different ways of approaching exploration of code and reusable components, arguably because they are coming from different verticals and are writing different kinds of business code. But there seemed to be some shared issues that made the situation a lot trickier. In short, the problem of code exploration & evaluation could be divided to four fundamental issues, namely:

• It is difficult determining best practice exemplar.
• It is problematic to find example code.

• The current Spotify search tools are inadequate.
• Developers are missing a natural marketplace for reusables.

The lay as much of a good foundation as possible for the ideation phase, it was necessary to convert the problem of code exploration & evaluation to an actionable problem statement using Point of Views (POVs) and How might we questions. These were the two POVs brought forward:

• Developers at Spotify need to be able to more easily discover reusable code components because it would prevet them from having to reinvent the wheel.
• Developers at Spotify need to be able to evaluate code because it would help them in their choice of which code to utilize.

Using Crazy 8's and the POVs, we created a myriad of different ideas to explore the solution space. Despite having come up with a few promising ideas, we decided to invite a few developers and stakeholders to the ideation in a remote design workshop. What followed was the work of merging, abandoning and refining ideas. Once three concrete ideas had made it through the screening, six design critique sessions were held with developers. During theses sessions, the ideas were presented briefly and some low fidelity paper prototypes were shown. A discussion regarding their general thoughts and concerns followed, and these opinions were used as support when deciding the idea to proceed with.

The Use Case Marketplace

The idea we decided to move forward with was a new concept called The Use Case Marketplace . The idea is quite simple, instead of trying to find reusable code components through their names, which many times are arbitrary and far from descriptive, the developers can now discover reusables via a new storefront; namely their use case and intended functionality. This way, we utilize what the developers already know when starting their search journey, that is, what they are looking to do and what functionality they need, and remove the current necessity of knowing the name of the reusable. The concept was prototyped and taken from a low fidelity to a medium fidelity state. The medium fidility prototype was then user tested and evaluted with six Spotify developers. The developers were taken through a discovery journey of trying to find a use case, see picture below. The focus of the tests were to examine the usability and the test participants’ overall perception of the concept as a whole; was this something the developers could see themselves use? One of the major learnings was the need to rethink how a developer narrows down the number of results. Being able to add addtional filter chips both through the search bar and via the dropdown menus was percieved as confusing and needed to be addressed for the final prototype. Overall, the learnings from the tests were used to iterate and tweak the concept before taking it to a high fidelity state.

Final prototype

The Use Case Marketplace concept consists of two parts: (1) the marketplace where the developers search for and find potentially useful use cases, and (2) the use case page itself where the developer would read up on the use case.

Searching for use cases

A developer narrows down the number of use cases by adding keyword-based chips in the search bar, describing what functionality they are looking to achieve and the current constraints they have. The system then presents the developer with several cards, each representing a use case matching the specified chips.

The final concept was presented for Spotify stakeholders in the begin of June and was very well perceived. The future of the concept remains unclear, but the work to put more focus on discoverability across the Spotify ecosystem has already started. Alongside the final concept, 15 user experience factors to consider when designing for discoverability in enterprise software was extracted and served as the main result for the academia and the final thesis report. If you are interestest in the report and the 15 factors, feel free to let me know and I will share the report with you.

Android Police

Spotify tackles youtube music head-on with music videos.

It’s a limited release for now, but Spotify has big plans

• Spotify is rolling out music videos to Premium subscribers in select regions.
• The feature allows switching between audio and video, though it's limited to a few titles only for now.
• Videos can be watched in portrait or landscape, and there are the usual playback and skipping buttons available.

For all its early flaws, there has always been one key feature YouTube Music stands for long before anyone else: access to all the music videos. With Spotify’s latest announcement, this advantage might soon fizzle out, though. The Swedish streaming giant has announced that it will start rolling out music videos in beta for select regions and titles.

Starting today, Spotify is rolling out music videos to some of its paid subscribers. The videos available across all platforms, whether it’s iOS, Android, a desktop, or a TV. In this early pilot phase, there is only a small selection of music videos, among them videos from Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Ice Spice, Aluna, and Asake.

What is Spotify? Music, pricing, features, and free-tier explained

Supported titles will show a new “Switch to Video” toggle in the Now Playing view that will start the video from the beginning. Switching back to audio seems more seamless, though. Spotify writes, “Want to return to background listening? Simply press ‘Switch to Audio.’” You can watch the video in landscape, and there are buttons for skipping back and forth by 15 second increments.

For now, Spotify is rolling out music videos to a few select regions only: UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya are on board. Given that it’s a staged rollout, it may still take a while to reach your Premium account even if you live in one of these countries.

Spotify makes clear that it could still tweak how the feature works based on feedback from artists and users over the course of the beta. The company ends its announcement with a statement that suggests we may not have to wait too long for music videos to arrive in more regions: “Stay tuned as we hope to expand the catalog of music videos and bring the feature to more users and countries.”

Spotify and YouTube aren’t the only app to offer music videos

Music videos have long become a popular part of other services.

While YouTube Music has a close association with music videos just based on its brand and history, it’s not the only music streaming service that has offered videos so far. For example, Tidal is another big service that gives you access to a big catalog of music videos, just like Apple Music does, too. There are also dedicated services like Vevo that specialize in videos.

In that sense, Spotify is late to the party. Given that it’s the most popular music streaming service out there, it may still help give music videos even more prominence than they already have on other platforms.

World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies

WorldCIST 2021: Trends and Applications in Information Systems and Technologies pp 337–352 Cite as

Keeping the Beat on: A Case Study of Spotify

• Inês Gomes 19 ,
• Inês Pereira 19 ,
• Inês Soares 19 ,
• Mariana Antunes 19 &
• Manuel Au-Yong-Oliveira 20  
• Conference paper
• First Online: 29 March 2021

3332 Accesses

3 Citations

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1366))

The music industry has faced a tremendous change ever since the emergence of streaming. People now had access to unlimited music to listen to and share with others, which is a great concept. As companies started to invest in the future of streaming, many platforms were created, one of them being Spotify. Standing amidst a crowd of competitors, Spotify managed to climb to the top and comfortably remain there over the years (listed on the NYSE and having 120 employees; IPO share price (3 rd April 2018) = 169.9 US Dollars and share price of 319.77 US dollars on 4 th December 2020). However, it was not easy. Being one of the top streaming platforms in the industry requires effort, investment, adaptation and innovation, and exceptional management. This study analyses in-depth the aforementioned aspects, as well as the company’s business models and its revenue, which combined, led Spotify to where it is today. A survey with 498 answers was performed regarding Spotify, and the results were analyzed by using descriptive and inferential (Chi-Square test) statistics. We thus conclude very confidently that there does seem to be an association (statistically significant at the 0.1% level) between age and the use of Spotify. Younger respondents (18–35 years) are more likely to use Spotify than older respondents (> 35 years). Overall, Spotify’s business model is one of the best in its field and is constantly evolving, which is what is to be expected of a company that seeks the top spot on the podium.

• Streaming platforms
• Business models

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Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

Inês Gomes, Inês Pereira, Inês Soares & Mariana Antunes

INESC TEC, GOVCOPP, Department of Economics, Management, Industrial Engineering and Tourism, University of Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

Manuel Au-Yong-Oliveira

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ISEG, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Álvaro Rocha

College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Hojjat Adeli

Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

Gintautas Dzemyda

DCT, Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal

Fernando Moreira

Department of Information Sciences, University of Sheffield, Lisbon, Portugal

Ana Maria Ramalho Correia

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Gomes, I., Pereira, I., Soares, I., Antunes, M., Au-Yong-Oliveira, M. (2021). Keeping the Beat on: A Case Study of Spotify. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Dzemyda, G., Moreira, F., Ramalho Correia, A.M. (eds) Trends and Applications in Information Systems and Technologies . WorldCIST 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72651-5_33

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Felix Gebauer

Spotify – The Spotify of Podcasts Analyzing the discourse surrounding Spotify’s ‘next phase of growth in audio.’

Publication.

Using a media industry studies framework, this thesis analyses the emergence and renegotiation of industry lore in times of disruption by analysing industry discourse surrounding Spotify’s acquisitions of and integration into the podcast industry in their self-proclaimed effort to be a market leader in the audio streaming industries. Since its founding in 2007, Spotify has continued to present itself as a supportive entity to the music industry yet continues to be dependent on Investors. Diversifying into adjacent audio media and multisided market strategy is seen as Spotify’s effort to become a profitable company. Spotify, using large quantities of aggregated data, has worked to redefine the value of the podcast medium as a diverse and engaging medium that, in conjunction with music, provides a viable alternative to radio. A process of renegotiation of existing practices and understandings within industry discourse is observable as discursively changing interpretations of podcasts value to and around the Spotify platform emerge. Spotify’s use of trade stories to drive narratives around significant changes within the company's strategy appears to mirror the approach to Spotify’s conception centred around the legal alternative to piracy narrative, and similar synergy narratives between industry and Spotify appear in podcast industry discourse. Five narrative themes of discourse were identified around which the renegotiation of industry lore was analysed. Firstly, the use of diversity of content and audiences in approaching the discursive construction of a unified global audience in the presence of a celestial jukebox of data and the reconstruction of the value of music and podcasts in the context of algorithmically curated diversity. Secondly, the renegotiation of exclusivity from consumer marketing towards a form of leverage in creating co-dependency with digital conglomerates. The use of data in establishing market control. The imaginary of algorithmically curated flow in redefining broadcast logic. Finally, the discursive renegotiation of the meaning of engagement between converging industries into new understandings of the value of content within the audio streaming industries. The analysis concludes by situating this industry lore within the power relations of the music industry and a critical review of the platformization practices of Spotify.

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Master Thesis- Online Behavioural Advertising: A Case Study of Belgian and Turkish Spotify Users' Privacy Concerns

Although online behavioural advertising is already quite popular among marketers, users’ privacy concerns increase due to limited control over personal information and when they targeted by irrelevant ads. While social media platforms are the most prevalent concerning this type of advertising, due to the rising popularity of music streaming services, marketers have started to extend their advertising on those services, e.g., Spotify. This is a user-centric, qualitative study that examines the effects of online behavioural advertising contextual patterns on users’ privacy concerns, with a single case study on Spotify including in-depth interviews on users’ behaviour and privacy concerns. The findings from study show that Spotify’s users have context-related privacy concerns, especially when it comes to unclear information flow, irrelevant personal information requests, and little or no benefit from sharing personal information.

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Tensions between Privacy and Targeted Advertising (Atena Editora)

Atena Editora

The problem of data privacy on the internet takes on a huge proportion, considering that personal databases are a source of economic value for companies, which gives rise to extensive discussion in ethical and legal terms. This article proposes an analysis of privacy, addressing the issue of Cookies, used to obtain personal information from users for targeted advertising, even if there is no user consent, or if this is compromised due to lack of information or understanding. The article questions whether the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU) is being violated through this increasingly common practice in the context of Digital Marketing. The methodology used was qualitative, descriptive and bibliographical, based on the law (GDPR) and on articles that deal with the subject.

Journal of Business Research

Pedro Palos

This research work has two objectives. On the one hand, to analyze the influence that Perceived Usefulness of Programmatic Advertising (PA) has on the user's Concern about Privacy, and on the other, to check whether this relationship changes over time. That is, to find out how improvements in the effectiveness of programmatic advertising might increase the users' concern for privacy. Today, programmatic advertising can be very invasive, not only because of the use of cookies and geolocation, but also because of using algorithms that analyze users' interests in order to offer related products at a later date when the user visits other different websites which are not at all related to the first. Secondly, this document investigates whether this relationship increases over time and if there are any time-related effects. In this study, data from of a very large sample of Internet users in Spain (n = 14,822) was analyzed at three different moments of time between 2013 and 2017. PLS-SEM was used for the analysis given its usefulness in social studies. Several groups were analyzed to test the difference between the path coefficients of the latent variables at different moments in time. Academics and professionals will benefit from this document by being able to see the importance of this relationship over time and how it changes. The use of a longitudinal study allowed for an investigation into, not only the existence of the relationship, but how it changed over the years.

Journal of Consumer Marketing

Ekin Pehlivan Yalcin

Purpose Privacy considerations have become a topic with increasing interest from academics, industry leaders and regulators. In response to consumers’ privacy concerns, Google announced in 2020 that Chrome would stop supporting third-party cookies in the near future. At the same time, advertising technology companies are developing alternative solutions for online targeting and consumer privacy controls. This paper aims to explore privacy considerations related to online tracking and targeting methods used for programmatic advertising (i.e. third-party cookies, Privacy Sandbox, Unified ID 2.0) for a variety of stakeholders: consumers, AdTech platforms, advertisers and publishers. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes the topic of internet user privacy concerns, through a multi-pronged approach: industry conversations to collect information, a comprehensive review of trade publications and extensive empirical analysis. This study uses two methods to collect data on consumer...

In the digital context, commercial communication may pose risks to consumer privacy. Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) uses monitoring technologies ("cookies") for consumer profiling and presenting personalized advertising, which involves the processing of personal data of users over time. To defend consumer rights, the use of "cookies" requires transparency, informed consent, and compliance with legal framework for protection of privacy in the electronic communications.

Computers in Human Behavior

G. Van Noort

Lorrie Cranor

We performed a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 subjects who answered advertisements to participate in a university study about Internet advertising. Subjects were not informed this study had to do with behavioral advertising privacy, but raised privacy concerns on their own unprompted. We asked, "what are the best and worst things about Internet advertising?" and "what do you think about Internet advertising?" Participants held a wide range of views ranging from enthusiasm about ads that inform them of new products and discounts they would not otherwise know about, to resignation that ads are "a fact of life," to resentment of ads that they find "insulting." Many participants raised privacy issues in the first few minutes of discussion without any prompting about privacy. We discovered that many participants have a poor understanding of how Internet advertising works, do not understand the use of first-party cookies, let alon...

Journal of Management Research and Analysis

Sadaf Siraj

Nahit Erdem KOKER , Ozgur Koseoglu

With the advent of digitization, consumer privacy and personal data protection in new media have arisen as new consumer rights issues. As message effectiveness has emerged as an issue in marketing communications, so has targeting the right consumers with the most appropriate messages become a common goal for marketers. However, targeting may result in some unethical practices such as tracking consumers’ web surfing patterns and using and selling their personal data without permission. As university students constitute one of the most active groups in new media, this study focuses on how they perceived consumer privacy, how deliberative they were during their online shopping activities and to what extent they were aware of the risk of providing personal data, particularly through social media, and its consequences. Analysis of transcripts from semi-structured in-depth interviews revealed themes of concern about online shopping and data protection, the effects of social media on perception of privacy, “check-in” on social media, experiences related to privacy breaches, and attitudes towards consumer privacy and marketing activities in new media. The findings and implications of the research are discussed, and suggestions for further study are presented at the end of the study.

Ralf De Wolf

Proceedings of the 2019 InSITE Conference

Dan Bouhnik

Aim/Purpose: In this exploratory study we examine personal information management within music streaming applications. Also, we investigate the sense of ownership over songs being played on music streaming applications and whether the use of these services may be considered a social activity. In a later stage, we intend to test privacy related issues in music streaming applications and the factors that influence privacy concerns when using these services. Methodology: This is examined by using a mixed methodology and consists of two phases: qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative stage includes semi-structured interviews with 10 music streaming application users in order to explore the possible change in personal information management, following the emergence of these applications (e.g. change in classification methods and song retrieval methods). The quantitative phase includes the distribution of closed ended questionnaires among 200-250 users of music streaming application...

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