Spotify Announces Google Cloud Platform Partnership

Spotify announced today on their news blog that they have selected Google Cloud Platform as an infrastructure partner for their popular music streaming service. Up until now, it appears Spotify has been managing that hardware burden themselves via multiple providers and data centers (including Amazon Web Services for whom they were an AWS case study). However the music company feels the robustness of cloud platform products have now reached a level of maturity and they are comfortable outsourcing.

Spotify claims it’s “a big deal” for them to work with a cloud leader like Google, but it’s also a big deal for Google that an industry leader in the streaming category would choose them. Certainly, Spotify could have chosen to expand service with AWS or even picked Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering to be at the foundation of their service.

Instead they chose the Google team led by Diane Greene (who became head of Google’s enterprise cloud business when the Mountain View behemoth acquired her startup called Beebop back in November).

And while mostly giving Google a pat on the back with this announcement, I felt like it stopped just short of a resounding endorsement when Spotify noted that “it’s a competitive space and we expect the big players to be battling it out for the foreseeable future” almost as if to say we always have options. But maybe I’m the only one who read it that way.

No doubt, there will be a lot fewer headaches in the infrastructure department at Spotify.