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Dan Arwady, B.S. computer science ’22, had played music seemingly forever and hoped to turn it into a career.

He’d go on to turn it into two.

Arwady works at YouTube, helping artists navigate software and other tools to more easily get their music in front of the public. He’s also seen his own music — produced in the spirit of the 1970s singer-songwriter, blending calming acoustic guitar and harmonies — enter the charts.

A passion for music

Growing up in the Chicago area, Arwady began formal music training around 12.

“It was drum lessons, and, in high school, it was marching band, jazz band, and orchestra,” said Arwady. “I started to write songs early and was in a band with my brother and two friends, playing shows at about 15. It’s always been a passion of mine.”

From ads to playlists

After earning a B.S. in business and an M.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Arwady started his career as an account manager for commerce services with Google in 2011. Following a series of promotions over the next few years, Arwady became an operations lead for Google Play Music and eventually transitioned to YouTube in 2017.

Despite already having success at YouTube, Arwady wanted to get involved with the more technical aspects of the company’s music archive and analytics departments and felt that the would get him up to speed.

“At YouTube, I was talking with engineers coming from really strong research backgrounds, and I wanted to understand the craft better,” he said. “����Ӱ�� State helped fill in all those gaps for me. The classes were challenging, and I found the experience very rewarding. I’m glad to be armed with better knowledge for my work.”

In his current role as partner engineering team lead (music labels), Arwady uses SQL, JavaScript, and Python to build partner-facing applications that deliver a range of analytics to YouTube’s music label customers.

Hundreds of thousands of songs are uploaded to YouTube in a given week from music labels, he says. Arwady’s group uses software to categorize the songs and work with relevant copyright systems to support their distribution.

“Some of the labels we work with are relatively new, but others are sitting on top of giant catalogues of decades of recorded music,” Arwady said. “It’s incredible the volume of music we’re working with.”

Despite the music archive’s massive size, Arwady is mindful that YouTube began as a video platform with content spread across multiple channels.

“With YouTube Music, you have tracks, albums, and artists built on top of the video platform format, so it’s a lot to know internally,” he said. “We’re building tools for a partner-facing application powered by a really large data pipeline. That pipeline is running about 40 or 50 scripts, scanning our music corpus daily, analyzing different aspects of contractual performance, and showcasing those results.”

Charting a parallel course in music

As for his other work, Arwady credits difficult life lessons as sometimes providing inspiration. Maybe his most well-known song, “Somebody Else,” came from one.

“That song was written after my father died, and it was really about spirit and overcoming loss,” he said.

It would reach #38 on the MediaBase Top 40 Activation Chart and #7 on the Music Week UK Commercial Pop Charts. His follow-up, “Cold in Memphis,” would top the MediaBase chart at #35. This September saw the release of Arwady’s first full-length album, “The Weight of Love,” containing both tracks.

Describing his music as folk, he recalls being inspired by talented singer-songwriters of the 1970s like Cat Stevens and James Taylor, and going back further to the foursome that inspired so many to pick up a guitar and start a band. “The Beatles were for me what they were for many,” he said. “How many people dreamed of writing classics that have stood the test of time, as so many of theirs have?”

Arwady may not be selling out Shea Stadium like the Fab Four just yet, but his following is growing, and he staged more than 50 gigs in 2025 alone. As his music career grows, so does his appreciation for being able to help other musicians through his work with YouTube. “I feel lucky that my passion really doesn’t have to wait until after work,” he said. “This has been the idea — that music could be a part of so much of my life.”