Spotify Teardown

Abstract

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.

Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture

“…A team of media studies researchers in Sweden has similarly been probing the limits of Spotify’s platform (Eriksson et al, 2019). Among other “interventions” in their “Spotify Teardown,” the team created a pseudo record label with a number of album releases, each designed to test various aspects of Spotify’s infrastructure.…”

“…Among other “interventions” in their “Spotify Teardown,” the team created a pseudo record label with a number of album releases, each designed to test various aspects of Spotify’s infrastructure. With guiding questions such as “Who or what decides what counts—or does not count—as music on Spotify?” the team has been peeling back some of the layers masking Spotify’s infrastructure by creating “fake” songs made up of breakfast-time sounds collected in a coffee shop, software plugins like “Songblocker” that gives users a version of Spotify that only plays its ads, and listening bots designed to boost play counts (Eriksson et al, 2019, p. 72). Their reverse engineering underlines how blurry the lines between legitimate user practices and unsanctioned machinic ones are.…”

“…Their reverse engineering underlines how blurry the lines between legitimate user practices and unsanctioned machinic ones are. As they ask, “what happens when—not if—streaming bots approximate human listener behavior in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish between a human and a machine?” (Eriksson et al, 2019, p. 76).…”

Internet histories and computational methods: a “round-doc” discussion

“…William J. Turkel: On this point, see Eriksson, Vonderau, Snickars, and Fleischer (2019). The authors explicitly engaged in covert and experimental methods (that violated the company's Terms of Use) to explore the "back end" of the streaming music service Spotify.…”

Streaming Music: Practices, Media, Cultures. By Sofia Johansson, Ann Werner, Patrik Åker and Gregory Goldenzwaig. New York: Routledge, 2018. 180 pp. ISBN 9781138633131

“…The recent publication of Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (Eriksson et al . 2019), authored by a group of mainly Swedish research scholars funded by the Swedish Research Council, has brought further attention to that company. Using a mix of ethnographic and digital methods, Spotify Teardown offers a critical insight into the development of the company from minor to major agent, and the way in which it has transformed music into flowing data and data about users’ behaviours into commodities.…”