This article analyzes Spotify as a media company that operates at the intersection of advertising, technology, music, and finance. In doing so, this article contributes to media industry studies as a field that investigates the relation between various industrial and economic actors. Given that the media industries, as any other industry, can be defined as a set of markets, one of which is the leading market, and to which other markets are auxiliary, the question asked is what market is leading in the case of Spotify. What the article describes as the “Spotify effect” is the company’s ability to fold markets into each other: to make disappear an aggressive financial growth strategy and business set-up based on ad tech engineering by creating an aura of Nordic cool and public benefit around its use of music. Spotify’s financial strategy has implications for the digital distribution of cultural content more generally.

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.

This chapter examines how recent depictions of data-center visibility function both as a mode of claiming corporate territory and as an obfuscation of the less picturesque dimensions of cloud infrastructure. Analyzing media infrastructure industries, such as the companies that run cloud systems, presents particular challenges for researchers. The structural convergence and functional heterogeneity of media make it difficult to apply some of the tried and true concepts in media and communication studies, such as the distinction between public and private. Using the Swedish data center as an example, the chapter then deciphers the backend of Internet architecture and data-trafficking policies, and highlights the importance of a relational perspective in understanding data centers as dynamic infrastructure nodes.

This article deals with the streaming of online video, along a line of comparison to the music industry. Based on qualitative empirical research conducted in Sweden and other European countries, the article focuses on one particular aspect of streamed media, aggregation, since aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. Developing its argument at the intersection of critical media industry studies and economic anthropology, the article argues that online aggregators have contributed to a process of devaluation that their services were designed to fight.

Multichannel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote affiliated YouTube channels, and develop video brands. They have often been criticized as driving YouTube’s commercialization, a seemingly recent phenomenon that sees hithertho informal practices of video making and sharing being increasingly formalized. This article challenges such beliefs about YouTube’s sudden makeover, based on archival evidence that allows to reconstruct YouTube’s long commercial history and on fresh field study data relating to one specific MCN and its content providers. Debunking the myth of ‘cocreation’, the article uses simple analogies – market, infrastructure, and franchise – to describe how MCNs contribute to establish asymmetrical relations between users and emergent industry systems online. It demonstrates how MCNs since 2006 have streamlined and standardized production inputs, reorganized cost per mille–based ad sales, and redefined the value of video in line with a more general financialization of media markets. The methodological framework for this empirical inquiry into YouTube’s first decade is based on economic sociology and infrastructure studies, and the argument itself framed by critical research on ‘connected viewing’, a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.