Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music
Feb 2019 · MIT Press
4.5star
11 reviewsreport
Ebook
288
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
4.5
11 reviews
Daniel Abrahamian
- Flag inappropriate
October 22, 2024
Not bad for a new book.
Fred Luckett
- Flag inappropriate
September 14, 2021
I love it 💕 so much
king von
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
May 31, 2025
nice
About the author
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.
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.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
