The purpose of this document is to present several ways in which the quality of music streaming can be measured in a quantitative way.
The benefit in continuously tracking these metrics is that we can measure the impact of improvements and and detect when we've done something wrong and broken the user's listening experience.
Measuring the time it takes from the moment the user requests playback until the audio starts. This is equal to the sum of the connection time and the initial buffer load time. See an example graph(1):