It first conducts a comparison of how two leading streaming platforms conceive of the individual music listener.
This article explores this idea by taking a closer look at online music streaming services. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people as individuals. In an age of personalized media, the word 'masses' seems like an anachronism. Raymond Williams once wrote, '… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses'. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption.
Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music.
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