Spotify went public today. Market Watch has some of the numbers:

The stock’s first trade was at $165.90 at 12:43 p.m. ET for 5.7 million shares, according to FactSet, or 27% above the reference price of $132. The stock then rose to an intraday high of $169, before falling to a low of $148.48. The stock was recently 9.8% below its opening price in afternoon trade.

Michael Tauberg, writing on Medium:

With the death of record stores, radio, and to a lesser extent, iTunes, the unit of music delivered to customers has shrunk. From the album, to the song, to now, the stream, music has been disentangled from it’s larger context. As such, we would expect that the names of albums and songs are uncorrelated to their musical success. One way to measure this is the number of unique words in a song title. Although there does appear to be an art to naming a hit song (or say book), the longer tail of music means more random song titles chosen by artists instead of record executives.

An interesting dive into music data.

Sophia Ciocca, writing for Hacker Noon:

The exact mechanisms behind NLP are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s what happens on a very high level: Spotify crawls the web constantly looking for blog posts and other written texts about music, and figures out what people are saying about specific artists and songs — what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them.

While I don’t know the specifics of how Spotify chooses to then process their scraped data, I can give you an understanding of how the Echo Nest used to work with them. They would bucket them up into what they call “cultural vectors” or “top terms.” Each artist and song had thousands of daily-changing top terms. Each term had a weight associated, which reveals how important the description is (roughly, the probability that someone will describe music as that term.)

Spotify has begun removing white-supremacist music from its service:

Spotify says it has removed an array of white-supremacist acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center three years ago.[…]

A Spotify spokeswoman told Billboard in a statement that while the music in its catalog comes from hundreds of thousands of record companies and aggregators all over the world, and those are “at first hand responsible” for the content they deliver, “illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us.”

Spotify has reportedly reached the 60 million paid subscriber mark:

Spotify now has 60 million paying subscribers, adding 10 million subscribers in less than five months, a spokeswoman for the music streaming company said on Monday.