Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet its success raises questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films is made available online. Borrowing the notion of "teardown" from reverse-engineering processes, this book playfully disassembles Spotify's product and our understanding of it. 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-only to receive a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use. Thus, the book itself becomes an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
Maria Eriksson is a social anthropologist and a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at Umeå University. Rasmus Fleischer is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economic History at Stockholm University. Anna Johansson is Associate Senior Lecturer in Ethnology at HUMlab at Umeå University. Pelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Umeå University. Patrick Vonderau is Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm University.