(The MIT Press)
by Maria Eriksson (Author), Rasmus Fleischer (Author), Anna Johansson (Author), Pelle Snickars (Author), Patrick Vonderau (Author)
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.
