Spotify Teardown

Rasmus Fleischer

ISBN 10: 0262038900 / ISBN 13: 9780262038904

Published by The MIT Press Feb 2019, 2019

About this Item

Neuware -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.

Seller Inventory # 9780262038904

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Spotify Teardown
• Publisher: The MIT Press Feb 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262038900
• ISBN 13: 9780262038904
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 228W x 154H x 26D millimeters 228 millimeters width by 154 millimeters height by 26 millimeters depth
• Weight: 456 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.