How Spotify Can Maximize Server Bandwidth for the Release of Taylor Swift’s New Album
ECE Professor Edmund Yeh explains how Spotify can prepare itself for the anticipated extremely high traffic on Friday when Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets’ Department,” releases.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Taylor Swift arrives at the world premiere of the concert film “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” in Los Angeles on Oct. 11, 2023. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
Will Taylor Swift’s new album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ break Spotify? Content delivery expert explains how streaming services work
Swifties are gearing up for an exciting week ahead — Taylor Swift’s latest studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is set to drop on Friday, April 19.
Swift made headlines in February when she announced the new album during the 66th annual Grammy Awards. Fans were elated to learn that the album was to be released just a few months later.
But how will streaming services like Spotify handle what is likely to be an unprecedented amount of traffic when the album drops later this week?
Spotify, which has 602 million monthly users, temporarily went down for a short period during the launch of Swift’s last album “Midnights” in October 2022.
Can we expect the same thing to happen this time around?
Edmund Yeh, a Northeastern University electrical and computer engineering professor and an expert on content delivery technologies, says Spotify has likely been preparing for Swift’s album launch by reviewing traffic patterns during her other album launches and having copies of the new album already cached on servers located near Swifties.
Spotify must predict its traffic on Friday
Whether or not Spotify crashes again depends on how well the company estimates how much traffic it gets on launch day, Yeh says.
“These are very atypical events because Taylor Swift is such a big phenomenon,” he says. “They have to basically predict how much traffic there will be and where the traffic will originate. If they are really off, it could be a problem.”
But to really understand how companies like Spotify work and are able to handle large amounts of data and traffic at all, it’s important to understand the keystone internet technology it uses day to day, Yeh says.
They are known as “content delivery networks” or CDNs.
To explain how these works, Yeh uses an analogy.
A digital distribution network is created
Imagine Apple releases its latest iPhone and a huge number of customers begin to arrive at its stores to buy it. It would be unwise, Yeh says, for Apple to have to go back to its supplier in China or India every time a customer orders a phone and have that supplier ship the phone directly to the consumer from the production facility. That would be inefficient, and it would take weeks or months for customers to get their phones.
Instead, Apple has created a distribution network and ships iPhones to warehouses around the world before these large-scale launches. That way the phones are closer to where customers are purchasing them.
CDNs work the same way, but digitally, he says.
Instead of having to access digital files from an “origin” server possibly located on the other side of the world, CDN servers can be set up closer to the user. The CDN servers are then loaded up with “cached” copies of the files from the origin server — such as Swift’s new album — reducing download times, and traffic bottlenecks.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News