Design Music Streaming Service like Spotify
What is Spotify?
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.
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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 we support both free and premium users?
Interviewer: Yes. Free users should experience occasional ads during playback. Premium users should enjoy uninterrupted, ad-free listening.
Candidate: Do users interact only with individual songs, or can they also play albums and playlists?
Interviewer: Users should be able to play individual songs, albums, and playlists. These should be handled uniformly.
Candidate: Should users be able to build their own playlists by adding songs to them?
Interviewer: Yes. A user should be able to create a playlist and add songs to it.
Candidate: Should users be able to follow artists and get notified when a new album is released?
Interviewer: Yes. Users can follow artists and should receive notifications whenever those artists release new albums.
Candidate: Should the music player support playback controls like play, pause, and next track?
Interviewer: Yes. The user should be able to control playback using these actions. The player should behave differently based on its current state (stopped, playing, paused).
Candidate: Is search functionality in scope?
Interviewer: Yes. Users should be able to search for songs by title and artists by name.
Candidate: Do we want to show song recommendations?
Interviewer: Yes. Include a simple recommendation engine. For now, simulate genre-based or randomized recommendations.
After gathering the details, we can summarize the key system requirements.
- Support both free and premium tiers for users
- Support adding songs, albums, playlists, and artists
- Allow users to play songs, albums, and playlists uniformly
- Support playback controls: play, pause, and skip (next track)
- Allow users to create playlists and add songs to them
- Allow users to follow artists and receive notifications when a followed artist releases a new album
- Allow users to search for songs by title or search for artists by name
- Generate song recommendations using pluggable strategies (e.g., genre-based, randomized)
- Modularity: The system should be composed of well-defined modules
- Extensibility: The design should be flexible to allow future additions
- Maintainability: Code should be modular, easy to test, and cleanly organized
After the requirements are clear, the next step is to identify the core entities that will form the foundation of our design.