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.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the digitized newspaper collection at the National Library of Sweden, focusing on cultural heritage as digital noise. In what specific ways are newspapers transformed in the digitization process? If the digitized document is not the same as the source document – is it still a historical record, or is it transformed into something else? Design/methodology/approach The authors have analyzed the XML files from Aftonbladet 1830 to 1862. The most frequent newspaper words not matching a high-quality references corpus were selected to zoom in on the noisiest part of the paper. The variety of the interpretations generated by optical character recognition (OCR) was examined, as well as texts generated by auto-segmentation. The authors have made a limited ethnographic study of the digitization process. Findings The research shows that the digital collection of Aftonbladet contains extreme amounts of noise: millions of misinterpreted words generated by OCR, and millions of texts re-edited by the auto-segmentation tool. How the tools work is mostly unknown to the staff involved in the digitization process? Sticking to any idea of a provenance chain is hence impossible, since many steps have been outsourced to unknown factors affecting the source document. Originality/value The detail examination of digitally transformed newspapers is valuable to scholars depending on newspaper databases in their research. The paper also highlights the fact that libraries outsourcing digitization processes run the risk of losing control over the quality of their collections.

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Spotify Radio allows users to find new music within Spotify's vast back-catalogue, offering a potential infinite avenue of discovery. Nevertheless, the radio service has also been disliked and accused of playing the same artists over and over. We decided to set up an experiment with the purpose to explore the possible limitations found within "infinite archives" of music streaming services. Our hypothesis was that Spotify Radio appears to consist of an infinite series of songs. It claims to be personalised and never-ending, yet music seems to be delivered in limited loop patterns. What would such loop patterns look like? Are Spotify Radio's music loops finite or infinite? How many tracks (or steps) does a normal loop consist of? To answer these research questions, at Umeå University's digital humanities hub, Humlab, we set up an intervention using 160 bot listeners. Our bots were all Spotify Free users. They literally had no track record and were programmed to listen to different Swedish music from the 1970s. All bots were to document all subsequent tracks played in the radio loop and (inter)act within the Spotify Web client as an obedient bot listener, a liker, a disliker, and a skipper. The article describes different research strategies when dealing with proprietary data. Foremost, however, it empirically recounts the radio looping interventions set up at Humlab. Essentially, the article suggests a set of methodologies for performing humanist inquiry on big data and black-boxed media services that increasingly provide key delivery mechanisms for cultural materials. Spotify serves as a case in point, yet principally any other platform or service could be studied in similar ways. Using bots as research informants can be deployed within a range of different digital scholarship, so this article appeals not only to media or software studies scholars, but also to digitally inclined cultural studies such as the digital humanities.Snickars, Pelle: "More of the Same-On Spotify Radio", Culture Unbound, Volume 9, issue 2, 2017: 184-211. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se