“We live in a world that has changed beyond all recognition. Spotify Teardown is a powerful book exploring the new dimensions of streaming culture. Think of it as a roadmap to the near future of online media. Streaming has redefined how we consume media, and this excellent investigation into how, and why, we have all changed our media habits is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of media. It's that good!”
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky
“Spotify Teardown pries open the streaming giant's black box, looking under the service's glossy interfaces, curated playlists, and 'personalized' algorithms to provide an essential analysis that holds lessons not only for music but for digital media writ large. The book traces Spotify's rise from its pirate origins in the Swedish music/tech start-up scene to its current status as a publicly traded global media company enmeshed in a complicated assemblage of ad networks, venture capital investments, and major record label music licenses. This team of creative researchers shows how methodology is the new punk and provides a breakdown of one digital era's biggest players. The authors show how a company, platform, and metaphor outline the changing standards, values, and politics that 'map and shape the lives of streaming users.'”
Jeremy Morris, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison; author of Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture
“Employing a unique set of methods to study a streaming giant, Spotify Teardown provides an important investigation into the potential impacts of new media platforms on artists, culture, and the creative economy.”
David Touve, Senior Director, iLab, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
“A highly entertaining tale. You'll learn about: music spam, what constitutes a 'play,' the mysterious power of 'a better algorithm,' and mostly how venture capital and marketing hype have built an experiment with no exit.”
Geoffrey Jennings, Rainy Day Books
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
