New Spotify blog is the music streaming service’s solution to personalized discovery

Attention music lovers and market researchers alike: Spotify has created a The Spotify Insights Blog that will use consumer data to highlight how the world is listening to music.  The music blog will feature articles about music and how people experience it - pulling from the company's own listening data and music intelligence from The Echo Nest, the technology company Spotify bought in March that powers Web radio, recommendations, and playlists.

According to Eliot van Buskirk, Spotify's ‘Data Storyteller’ who runs the new blog, there will be several articles published each week about the way music has changed over time.  "It will create new ways for people to listen," Buskirk told CNET in a recent interview. "It can be daunting when there is so much music out there."

Working with the company's analysts on these musically-driven scientific experiments, Van Buskirk said his intent is to keep telling these stories, releasing these fascinating maps, info-graphics, articles, more lengthy than a regular company blog. It's a way to get these stories to anyone who's curious, including music fans, fans of data trivia, and journalists. 

“Most companies don't open their inner data stores to the outside,” he explained. “We want to turn it into these clear-cut nuggets of, hopefully, entertainment that's definitely scientifically driven.”

With streaming music services like Spotify growing more popular every day, their catalogs of millions of songs have solved one problem for consumers: access to nearly all the music in the world without breaking the bank. But, have also created another problem: with all that music at customers' fingertips, how do they find the songs they like but don't yet know? Spotify is solving this personalization conflict, along with video compatriots like Netflix and YouTube.

"A lot of the time we don't know what we're going to find until we start looking," said Buskirk. "The idea is to be rigorous with the data and expose our methodology, being as scientific as we can and telling as many reality-based stories as we can."

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, Digital Impact, STEAM Accelerator and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.