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Music Personalization at Spotify
Five years ago, music personalization at Spotify was a tiny team. The team read papers, developed models, wrote data pipelines and built services. Today personalization involves multiple teams in New York, Boston & Stockholm producing datasets, feature engineering and serving up products to users. Features like and…
By Spotify engineers · Spotify · Added 2026-10-12
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What you are about to study
Spotify explains a real system. You should know the basics: caching, queues and replication.
Ideas you will meet
- Distributed Systems
- Consensus, time, failure and the fundamentals of scale-out.
- Machine Learning Systems
- Recommendations, ranking, feature stores and serving models at scale.
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A path through videos, articles, other case studies and code on the same ideas as Music Personalization at Spotify.
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Books · Free from the author
Concurrent and Distributed Systems (Cambridge lecture notes)
Eight lectures on time, broadcast, replication, consensus and transactions, with notes, slides and video. Free from the author under CC BY-SA.
University of CambridgeIntermediate
Books · Free from the author
Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
How networks are built and why: protocols, routing, congestion control and the internet's architecture. The authors publish it free online under CC BY 4.0.
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WatchHow others solve the same problem, on video.
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ReadEngineers explain it in their own words.
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Read the codeSee how it looks when it is real.
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