When machine learning matters

1 · Erik Bernhardsson · Aug. 5, 2016, 4 a.m.
I joined Spotify in 2008 to focus on machine learning and music recommendations. It’s easy to forget, but Spotify’s key differentiator back then was the low-latency playback. People would say that it felt like they had the music on their own hard drive. (The other key differentiator was licensing – until early 2009 Spotify basically just had all kinds of weird stuff that employees had uploaded. In 2009 after a crazy amount of negotiation the music labels agreed to try it out as an experiment. Bu...