[Commlist] new book: Spotify teardown: inside the black box of streaming music

new book:
SPOTIFY TEARDOWN: INSIDE THE BLACK BOX OF STREAMING MUSIC.
MIT PRESS 2019.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spotify-teardown

by Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, 
Patrick Vonderau

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.

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