Spotify unveils new A/B testing platform Confidence

Spotify has unveiled a new commercial product for development teams called Confidence. It was created on the basis of its own platform for conducting experiments. Confidence is designed to make it easier for teams to create, run, coordinate, and analyze their own user tests, allowing them to quickly optimize their ideas. Confidence is currently only available in closed beta.

“Spotify data scientists and engineers have spent years developing and honing methods for testing our products,” the company writes in a blog post. “Whether it’s auto-coordinating concurrent A/B tests or deploying AI-powered recommenders across mobile, desktop, and web apps, the platform we’ve built allows us to extend best practices and experimentation to all of our teams. Soon this platform for experimentation will be available to any company that wants to create, test and iterate ideas the way we do at Spotify: quickly, reliably and confidently.”

Spotify says Confidence is designed to help any team, whether they’ve outgrown their current testing platform or are looking for a quick and easy way to get started with A/B testing.

According to the streaming service, their experimental work began in the early 2010s, when several data scientists and engineers began doing small A/B tests internally. While these tests were manual and error prone, Spotify understood the importance of experimentation and wanted to get better at it. Then the company decided to create its own basic platform for A / B testing, which it called ABBA.

The platform made it possible to show and analyze functions according to a number of standard indicators. This sparked a wave of experimentation across the company, Spotify said, and from less than 20 priority experiments, the company moved on to hundreds of experiments a year by multiple groups.

Confidence will be available to customers in three versions. First, it can run as a managed service, which means accessing the experimental platform as a standalone web service managed by Spotify. Secondly, it can be run as a Backstage plugin. Finally, you can integrate the Confidence platform into your own infrastructure using the API.

Now software development teams can sign up for a waiting list to be invited to participate in Confidence. Spotify hasn’t said when it plans to make Confidence more accessible.

It’s worth noting that Confidence is Spotify’s second commercial monetization product for developers. Last December, Spotify unveiled its plan to monetize developers through the open source Backstage project. Spotify Backstage is a platform designed to tidy up companies’ infrastructure by allowing them to create customized “developer portals” that bring together all of their tools, applications, data, services, APIs and documents in a single interface.

Today’s announcement shows that while Spotify is primarily known as a music streaming service for consumers, it is looking to go beyond that.