Universal Spotification? The shifting meanings of “Spotify” as a model for the media industries

Abstract

Ever since the music streaming service Spotify was launched in 2008, it has been referred to as a model for an ongoing transformation of the media industries. Dozens of other technology startups have promised to deliver "a Spotify for books", "a Spotify for movies", "a Spotify for journalism" or even "a Spotify for art". Yet, most attempts to replicate the model has actually failed. Analyzing a large body of Swedish and US news articles from 2008-2018, this article demonstrates how the metaphor of "Spotify" has been filled with very different meaning. Not only has the early promises of relying on advertising to make consumption "free but legal" been discarded, in favor of subscription-based models. Another major trend in the development of streaming services, including Spotify, has been the shift toward curation and algorithmic recommendation systems, which has added new associations to the metaphor or "a Spotify for x".

How streamification challenges the Royal Danish Library’s collection of cultural heritage

“…Th is development suggests that spotifi cation is a subset of streamifi cation. Fleischer (2021) discusses universal spotifi cation based on analyses of software and services that borrow the Spotify model, however, the Spotify model is far from the mainstay, and when discussing video streaming we could just as easily refer to the Netfl ix model to outline graphical user interfaces, infrastructures, and global markets of streaming. Fleischer (2021) does point out important diff erences between the two companies as he traces metaphorical overlaps between them that changed during the 2010s.…”

Capitalismo de plataformas, producción y consumo de música: el caso de Spotify

“…Desde su lanzamiento oficial en 2008, Spotify pasó por varias etapas relacionadas con aspectos de su diseño, permisos legales e internacionalización (Fleischer, 2020;Eriksson et al, 2019). A pesar de estos contratiempos, surge el consenso que Spotify fue la solución de la industria de la música frente a la crisis originada por los intercambios peer to peer entre usuarios de Internet.…”

“…En primer lugar, a través de su actividad en la plataforma, los usuarios generan datos, los cuales se procesan y permiten a Spotify elaborar listas de reproducción personalizadas para cada uno. En segundo lugar, también les permite construir listas de reproducción que pueden ser aprovechadas por otros, por lo que cualquiera puede generar contenido, similar a lo propuesto en el principio de la Web 2.0 (Fleischer, 2020).…”

“…Por un lado, hay un grupo de investigaciones que se han situado en el plano económico y organizacional de la plataforma que ha abordado la integración de la plataforma con los mercados financieros (Vonderau, 2019), el modelo de ganancias y sus remuneraciones (Kasap & Yalcintas, 2020;Marshall, 2015). Además, se ha realizado una revisión general del modelo organizacional de Spotify (Eriksson et al, 2019;Fleischer, 2020).…”

"Mjuzica.hr" kao poduzetnički projekt u modelu glazbene streaming platforme

“…Spotify je, prema broju korisnika i prihodima koje ostvaruje, najveća glazbena streaming platforma, a model u kojem posluje poslužio je kao predložak za različite oblike distribucije sadržaja na drugim stremenog platformama. Fleischer (2020) ističe kako je obrazac po kojem je nastala glazbena platforma postao temelj po kojem se pokušalo distribuirati razne medijske sadržaje. Manje ili više uspješno, po uzoru na Spotify razvile su se platforme za distribuciju knjiga, časopisa, video sadržaja i slično.…”