{"product_id":"spotify-teardown-inside-the-black-box-of-streaming-music-9780262038904","title":"Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. \u003ci\u003eSpotify Teardown\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpotify 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSpotify Teardown \u003c\/i\u003ecombines 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaria Eriksson is a social anthropologist and a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Ume? University. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRasmus Fleischer is a postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Economic History at Stockholm University. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAnna Johansson is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Ethnology at HUMlab at Ume? University. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ume? University. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePatrick Vonderau is Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm University.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50844197323026,"sku":"9780262038904","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_9a008674-abe3-4ff4-895b-17e0da399c91.jpg?v=1737313843","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/spotify-teardown-inside-the-black-box-of-streaming-music-9780262038904","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}