Spotify moving its data to Google servers

Scandinavian music streaming company Spotify is moving most of its data from its own hodge-podge of servers around the world to Google Cloud Platform.

But its music files remain with Amazon, the long time dominant player in cloud hosting, on its Simple Storage and CloudFront services.

Already 250,000 of the 75 million users have been moved across, with the remainder to take the next 18 months. Spotify has 20 million subscribers.

According to Spotify, Google’s superior data analytics capabilities and tools as Dataproc, Pub/Sub and BigQuery, were the deciding factor in the move.

“This is a big deal,” Nicholas Harteau, Spotify’s VP of Engineering and Infrastructure said emphatically. “At Spotify we are obsessed with providing a streaming experience that feels as though you have all the music in the world on your phone.

“Historically, we’ve taken a traditional approach to doing this: buying or leasing data-center space, server hardware and networking gear as close to our customers as possible. This approach has allowed us to give you music instantly, wherever you are in the world.”

Speculation has started that it could end up with Google buying out Spotify, using its big numbers to strengthen its presence in the streaming market. Google apparently began negotiations in 2014 to buy Spotify but price was a sticking point. The recent move to Google also saw hard negotiation over price.