Design Music Streaming Service like Spotify
Design a music streaming service like Spotify that allows users to search, play, and manage songs, create playlists, and stream music, using object-oriented design.
Spotify is a popular digital music streaming platform that gives users access to a vast library of songs, albums, podcasts, and audio content from artists and creators around the world.
It offers features such as:
- Searching and playing tracks on-demand
- Creating personalized playlists
- Following favorite artists or albums
- Streaming audio over the internet, either via an ad-supported free tier or an ad-free premium subscription
In this chapter, we will explore the low-level design of a Spotify like service in detail.
Lets start by clarifying the requirements:
1. Clarifying Requirements
Before starting the design, it's important to ask thoughtful questions to uncover hidden assumptions and better define the scope of the system.
Here is an example of how a conversation between the candidate and the interviewer might unfold:
Candidate: Should the system support both free and premium user tiers?
Interviewer: Let’s keep it simple for now and assume all users have the same access like premium users.
Candidate: Should users be able to create and manage their own playlists?
Interviewer: Yes, playlist creation and basic playlist operations (add/remove/reorder songs) should be supported.
Candidate: Do we need to support a recommendation engine or auto-generated content like "Suggested for You"?
Interviewer: Not for now. We’ll focus on core functionality like search, browse, play, and playlist management.
After gathering the details, we can summarize the key system requirements.
1.1 Functional Requirements
- Allow users to search for songs, albums, and artists
- Allow users to stream songs on demand
- Support creation and management of playlists (create, delete, add/remove songs, reorder tracks)
- Allow browsing songs by genre, artist, album, or popularity
1.2 Non-Functional Requirements
- Modularity: The system should be composed of well-defined modules like UserService, PlaylistService, StreamingService, and SearchService
- Scalability: The system should support high concurrent usage and scalable music streaming across millions of users
- Extensibility: The design should allow future additions like offline mode, collaborative playlists, user tiers, and personalized recommendations
- Availability: Streaming and core services should be highly available and fault-tolerant
- Performance: Song playback and search should have minimal latency; playlists should load instantly
- Security: User data and music content should be protected with proper access controls and encryption
- Maintainability: Code should be modular, easy to test, and cleanly organized for future enhancements