Ed Sheeran's success? The impressive cloud infrastructure behind it.

On March 10th, a new record on music was broken. Ed Sheeran's new album "Divide" sold an amazing 672,000 on his first week, giving Sheeran the highest opening week album sales in Official Chart history for a male artist.

Sheeran also broke all records concerning streaming and digital download in Spotify. Only on the debut day the album had more than 56,7 millions streams on Spotify.

Although the numbers of Sheeran's album sales are impressive, without the contemporary IT-infrastructure it would not have been possible to have so many people from all over the world listen to his album in such a short period of time. How does Spotify do it?

Spotify relies on Google’s cloud computing platform service to listeners - A regular internet connection of 1mb, should allow you to listen to Sheeran's songs instantaneously. To understand the necessary IT-infrastructure, it is worthy to check how much bandwidth Spotify Sheeran's record represents.

Spotify has 3 different audio quality:

• Low quality: 96 kbps
• Average quality: 160 kbps
• Extreme quality: 320 kbps

Kbps are a bit rate measurement which means the number of bits per second transmitted along a digital network. In average Spotify stream uploads 160 bits per second for each song

Considering average Spotify upload rate and an average of 3.5 minutes per song, Sheeran's "Divide" trasmitted 238.2gb of data just in the first day or an average of 66.2 mb per sec.

If you had to upload all this data by yourself considering average UK upload speed of 2.9mb/s, it would take 296 hours, or approximately12 days to have the task done. Impressive for Spotify!

Spotify relies on Google's Data centers to provide a smooth experience for Ed Sherran's fans and make all these number possible. Google’s Data centers use around 260 million watts of power, divided into 13 big center and 900.000 serves, which accounts for 0.01% of global energy consumption.

Sheeran's record smashed most of the existent ones. If you look into streaming data, it is impressive how many people were able to quickly listen to it at the same time. All this is just possible due to current music structure, where you can rely on platforms such as Spotify where such an amount of data can be provided instantaneously anytime and anywhere.

Source: StreamHostLink