Maria Eriksson is a social anthropologist and a PhD candidate in
the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Ume University.
Rasmus Fleischer is a postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of
Economic History at Stockholm University.
Anna Johansson is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Ethnology at
HUMlab at Ume University.
Pelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at
Ume University.
Patrick Vonderau is Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm
University.
Full of canny insights about media disruption and algorithm culture
as well as odd tidbits that will delight music history fans...the
book is as much a chronicle of Spotify the company as it is an
open-ended question about the future of music.—Rolling Stone
This incredible investigation will open your eyes to an entire
universe of data sharing and online marketing occurring at octaves
too low for human consciousness to detect.—Big Think
A work that is, by turns, both surprising and banal, provocative
and benign, empowering and frustrating.—THE QUIETUS
Dispels the misunderstanding that Spotify is - or at least
primarily - about music.—Süddeutsche Zeitung
I loved the book and I highly recommend it.... Spotify is portrayed
not as a company that was interested in saving the music industry
but as one that was created by a couple of bored advertising
bros.... Spotify Teardown shows a company much like all
advertising-support music platforms, where the ultimate customer is
Coca-Cola; not music fans nor artists.—Penny Fractions
Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music is an
ambitious, wide-ranging, and mis-titled book. Studying firms like
Spotify is notoriously challenging....The result is a
methodological commitment to exteriority, which pays off in the
form of delightfully inventive methods that reimagine the nature of
the thing we call Spotify. Thus, if I suggest that this book should
be subtitled “Outside the Black Box,” it is no insult: its greatest
contribution may be demonstrating how important the “outside”
is—both to Spotify's functioning and to what we understand it to
be.—Information & Culture: A Journal of History
Highly readable.... The rigor and curiosity with which they treat
their subject are necessary: Spotify has completely transformed the
music industry, and to truly understand how and why requires
illuminating each nebulous part of the company.—The Nation
The book is not so much a nuts-and-bolts analysis of how Spotify
works so much as a critical account of why it works the way it does
today.—
Spotify Teardown is a book very much of this moment. As well as
considering the streaming platform's 'front end' through consulting
news coverage, company blogs, financial results, interface analysis
and more, it also uses numerous experimental methodologies n an
attempt to get at Spotify's mysterious 'back end', and its
particular algorithm enabled wrangling of the digital music
commodity.—Convergence
Spotify Teardown is a rhyme and reason for all platforms mediating
our musical consumption. There's a hint of quasi-fascist
gatekeeping: you wouldn't need to type in 'Latin' in South America,
because that's all you'll be offered, and their policy of cis good
life imagery, of 'chrono normative' lifestyles — of getting out of
bed, going to work, to the gym — normalises how we chill into
categories we can imitate.—DJ Mag
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