Research Catalog

Title

Spotify teardown : inside the black box of streaming music / Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau.

Author

Eriksson, Maria, 1988-

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2019]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-
• Johansson, Anna, 1980-
• Snickars, Pelle
• Vonderau, Patrick

Description

ix, 276 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. This book contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of 'teardown' from reverse-engineering processes, 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. Their 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.

Subject

• Spotify
• Music and the Internet
• Sound recording industry
• MUSIC > History & Criticism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-271) and index.

Contents

Introduction -- Intervention: The Swedish unicorn -- 1. Where is Spotify? -- Intervention: Record label setup -- 2. When do files become music? -- Intervention: How we track streams -- 3. How does Spotify package music? -- Intervention: Too much data -- 4. What is the value of free? -- Intervention: Introducing Songblocker -- Conclusion -- Intervention: Work at Spotify!

Call Number

*LE 19-2321

ISBN

• 9780262038904
• 0262038900

LCCN

2018011908

OCLC

1029806746

Author

Eriksson, Maria, 1988- author.

Title

Spotify teardown : inside the black box of streaming music / Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau.

Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2019]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-271) and index.

Added Author

Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978- author.

Johansson, Anna, 1980- author.

Snickars, Pelle, author.

Vonderau, Patrick, author.

Other Form:

Online version: Eriksson, Maria. Spotify teardown. Cambridge : MIT Press, 2019 9780262349680 (OCoLC)1082868958

Research Call Number

*LE 19-2321