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.
