''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. Their 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.''
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Intervention: The Swedish unicorn -- 1. Where is Spotify? -- Intervention: Record label setup -- 2. When do files become music? -- Intervention: How we track streams -- 3. How does Spotify package music? -- Intervention: Too much data -- 4. What is the value of free? -- Intervention: Introducing Songblocker -- Conclusion -- Intervention: Work at Spotify!
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-271) and index.