Heading: Taylor Swift’s New Album “The Tortured Poets Department” Set to Drop on Friday
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.
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.”
To really understand how companies like Spotify work and are able to handle large amounts of data and traffic, it’s important to understand the keystone internet technology they use day to day, Yeh says.
They are known as “content delivery networks” or CDNs.
CDNs work by distributing content onto edge servers closer to users, reducing download times and traffic bottlenecks. Yeh uses an analogy of Apple distributing iPhones to warehouses around the world before a launch to explain how CDNs work digitally.
In anticipation of Swift’s new album, Spotify needs to accurately predict traffic patterns and provision enough edge servers with sufficient storage capacity and bandwidth to handle the surge in traffic.
CDNs were invented about two decades ago and have been instrumental in making the internet less prone to crashing, Yeh says. The majority of internet traffic is carried by CDNs today.
During the launch of Swift’s last album in 2022, Spotify crashed for a short period, highlighting the importance of technology in delivering music to millions of people around the globe.
“Her album launch is clearly going to be a great media phenomenon, and the internet is going to have a huge challenge,” Yeh says. “Taylor Swift is a great example of why you need these content delivery networks.”