Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

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Maria Eriksson (PhD Candidate, Umeå University) Rasmus Fleischer (Postdoctoral Researcher, Stockholm University)

Spotify Teardown

Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

Maria Eriksson (PhD Candidate, Umeå University), Rasmus Fleischer (Postdoctoral Researcher, Stockholm University), Anna Johansson (Assistant Lecturer, Umeå University) , Pelle Snickars (Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Umeå University)

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English

MIT Press
19 February 2019

Media studies; Music industry; Audio processing

Series: The MIT Press

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of ""teardown"" from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.

Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.

Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's ""front end"" with experimental, covert investigations of its ""back end."" The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

By: Maria Eriksson (PhD Candidate Umeå University), Rasmus Fleischer (Postdoctoral Researcher, Stockholm University), Anna Johansson (Assistant Lecturer, Umeå University), Pelle Snickars (Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Umeå University), Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm University)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 17mm
ISBN: 9780262038904
ISBN 10: 0262038900
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 19 February 2019
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Maria Eriksson is a social anthropologist and a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Umeå University. Rasmus Fleischer is a postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Economic History at Stockholm University. Anna Johansson is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Ethnology at HUMlab at Umeå University. Pelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Umeå University. Patrick Vonderau is Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm University.

Reviews for Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

Full of canny insights about media disruption and algorithm culture as well as odd tidbits that will delight music history fans...the book is as much a chronicle of Spotify the company as it is an open-ended question about the future of music. -Rolling Stone