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.
