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Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

Maria Eriksson,

Rasmus Fleischer,

Anna Johansson,

Pelle Snickars,

Patrick Vonderau

3.31 · Rating details · 173 ratings · 21 reviews

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 noti ...more

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published February 19th 2019 by The MIT Press (first published 2019)

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Apr 05, 2019 Roy rated it it was ok

Spotify Teardown is an insightful glimpse into the inner workings of Spotify, but lacks the critical argument and risk, an academic work ought to make. Eriksson knows this, but published anyways. Years of research ought to accomplish something, and yet ST is less about ethnography, and more about the process of research methodology.

While its observations, and Interventions, are interesting, they lack the "so what?" every academic must take a stand on, otherwise, the result is a little more than ...more

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May 16, 2019 David Dinaburg rated it really liked it

“Platform scholars need to triangulate by relating user participation, computing technology, and economics in one way or another.” I went for Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music because of positive experiences with I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, and Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. This genre—Platform Studies—has become a favorite, though I wouldn’t recognize its roots spanned over “Platform scholars need to triangulate by relating user participation, computing technology, and economics in one way or another.” I went for Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music because of positive experiences with I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, and Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. This genre—Platform Studies—has become a favorite, though I wouldn’t recognize its roots spanned over a decade; the urtext Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction was written by the co-author of Racing the Beam, and that book, which I uncovered because of an adolescence spent with Multi User Dungeons [MUDs], primed me for scholarly breakdowns of how modern commercial platforms work. I knew things in this niche field were interrelated, but imagine my joy when Teardown cited Racing the Beam by name within the first dozen pages!

A deep dive into Spotify’s software—software I have used over the course of my life for more hours than I ever played the NES (heck, just on The Lumineers’ album Cleopatra alone)—is catnip. What makes Teardown unique in the world of platform studies was how it peeled back layers of purposefully misleading market positioning and dug at the nature of branded content and playlists:

Not only are the in-house playlists (Filtr/Sony; Digster/Universal; Topsify; Warner Music) thematically tailored to match advertisers’ potential target groups, they can also be sponsored by advertising clients. Moreover, as musical discovery through playlists is a prominent selling point for Spotify, playlists work as promotional devices for record labels and musicians. Because curation “has become a neutralised marketing term for taste-making and gatekeeping,” the selection and inclusion of specific artists on Spotify-curated playlists—some of them with millions of followers—have enormous effects for building a fan base and for increasing the number of streams and generating more revenue...meanwhile, Spotify keeps asserting the independence of its in-house content curators.

Spotify is not a “platform” for musical access in the way that an Atari or Nintendo were designed to give users access to video games, but a brokerage for advertisers to attach their wares to thematic events that are delimited by musical cues. Make a playlist for “morning commute” and you’ve got a self-selected market ready to go, primed to hear ads about office clothes and weekend getaways.

This non-optional opt-in of user data—I can’t use my iphone if I don’t give Apple access how often I touch it, I can’t fix my John Deere without proprietary diagnostic software—is about a phony as it gets; the illusion grows fainter and fainter when it is access to user data that makes Spotify valuated at billions of dollars. This more recent push for “music for all moments” is a transparent bid to increase the consumption of music and expand the reach of their tracking metrics by positing ubiquitous streaming as essential to productive life. If I go for a run, there is a playlist that matches my targetted run pace; If I’m studying, the Brain Food soundtrack has me covered:

While the idea that music can be used to control one’s body and mind is not new, the mode of “ubiquitous listening” facilitated by streaming services seems to correlate with a broader turn toward a utilitarian approach to music, whereby music consumption is increasingly understood as situational and functional for certain activities (rather than, for instance, a matter of identity work or an aesthetic experience).

Algorithmic recommendations lean hard into the recombination of tracks into playlists, and Teardown answered my single greatest Spotify question—does listening to the personalized “Discover Weekly” playlist solidify the algorithmic trajectory of my profile, self-reinforcing its decisions like a little musical filter bubble?

I can safely say, “Maybe.” I know the format of Spotify before their curatorial turn—type in a song and it plays right away—had a place in the world for people who knew their own music taste; it was perfect minus the lack of the Violent Femmes live album which has been unavailable for streaming since forever and I would really like to hear it again. But if you don’t know what you want, don’t leave it up to the algorithmic crawl of the robots. It’s pretty clear they don’t care what you they feed you, as long as the consumption is measurable. ...more

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Aug 08, 2020 Erkan Saka rated it liked it

Shelves: newmedia, mediastudies

This is definitely one of the most detailed accounts of Spotify's progress. Despite the average rating I gave, I suggest anyone who is interested in the relevant issue to have a look at this book.
What I could not ignore is the fact that the authors have such an intense ressentiment against Spotify. One cannot help but feel it throughout the book. I wish the authors could have a more distanced positioning.
Moreover, I admire that the authors engage an algorithmic deciphering of Spotify's working ...more

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Mar 16, 2019 Tefo Mohapi rated it it was amazing

The matter-of-fact style that the book is written in is quite refreshing. It is understandable once you learn that it is written by researchers who used various methods including reverse engineering and bots to learn more about Spotify's inner workings. Also refreshing is how the authors always admit their biases and write about where they were wrong. For me, having tracked music streaming for over half a decade, some of the revelations were already known but nice to have hard evidence to back t ...more

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May 27, 2019 Arielle rated it liked it

I think I went into this with the wrong expectations. I thought it would be more of a narrative but it was written like an academic paper (which makes sense, considering that it's research). It was insightful but they really took a topic that I think would interest a lot of people and turned it into something that will make people's eyes glaze over as they read. ...more

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Aug 27, 2019 Artem rated it it was ok

Combative, dilettantish, barely technical and naive.

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Dec 15, 2020 Emily rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, other-nonfiction

Lot of interesting ideas and questions in here, but it's way too much of an academic research study to be something you can just...like...read. The language is clear enough but the content is always just a few degrees sideways of what I'd be interested in, the focus too much on the academic literature and research variables to go down cool tangents. I just happened to see the book referenced in this article and thought it sounded fascinating, but the audience is definitely folks well versed in d ...more

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Aug 13, 2019 Daniel Cukier rated it it was amazing

I liked this book, not only because of the deeply description of how Spotify works from inside, but also because of the scientific rigor on which it is written. It is a must read for all music intusiasts, as it marks one of the most important happenings of our time related to music industry and consumption.

We must put a special highlight on the debate the book brings about research ethics boundaries. The authors tried to contact Spotify to get support for their research. Spotify ignored the cal ...more

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Mar 06, 2019 K rated it really liked it

3.5 stars. Groundbreaking observations in a study that's shockingly narrow in scope. The quality of writing made me sad and will probably severely limit who ends up reading this. That's really too bad because some of the group's conclusions should be shared far and wide. ...more

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Jul 13, 2019 Joey Lee rated it liked it

A bit disappointing in the terms of the quality & results of their studies, but good in terms of explaining the history of spotify, how they have changed and why.

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Aug 27, 2019 Dan Watts rated it it was ok

I ended up browsing the book more than actually reading it. It has 2 problems. First and foremost, the writing is overly academic, focusing more on the social implications of streaming music than a description of how Spotify actually runs the business. Secondly, it is heavily biased against Spotify, without convincingly explaining what the problem is.

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Jun 23, 2019 Antoine Balaine rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2019, economics, music-business

Darn this read was wordy. The dry info could have fit in 50 pages.

Though interesting, the playful tone that the book announced had a hard time staying on track and buried its findings under lengthy, conceptually vague term definitions. Discussing why your methodology is «gonzo» for pages on doesn't help your research.

I suspect a lot of this wordiness was due to extra caution out of fear for a spotify lawsuit. ...more

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Jan 03, 2021 Artem Gordin rated it it was ok

Don't get me wrong - maybe it's a good academic publication. But it's a bad book: as someone mildly interested in Spotify as a force in music, culture and business, I gained zero new insights from it. The book is academically thorough, but absolutely descriptive, telling any informed reader only what they've already known, but in a way you can quote in further articles.

To my dismay, it made no mention or attempt to look at Spotify internal tools (like PUMA, BaRT etc) that shape the music habits ...more

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Jul 06, 2020 Jamie rated it it was ok

While I am not an academic, and therefore may not be the authors' intended audience, I am a technologist at a leading music streaming service, and I was unimpressed by both their technical capabilities (they describe difficulties running simple scripted bots) and business familiarity. This was an illuminating survey of Spotify's history, but for anyone with any experience in any of the business or technical domains they're actually trying to understand (personalization, digital supply chains, et ...more

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Mar 07, 2020 James Mishra rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: purchased, entertainment-industry

This book operates at the wrong level of abstraction

The authors of this book are highly-credentialed but don't seem to think very clearly when it comes to matters about business. They tend to treat marketplace businesses as the same as businesses where the supply is under monolithic control.

They also waste a lot of time and space on highly-technical matters like running Wireshark on the Spotify Desktop client. I'm a software engineer and I think this is cool, but there isn't a whole lot in the p ...more

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Mar 08, 2020 Ogi Ogas rated it really liked it

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

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Jun 12, 2019 Mugren Ohaly rated it liked it

Shelves: 2019

We take things for granted. Companies just want to make money and have access to people’s information. If we all stopped to consider how unhelpful Spotify is at introducing us to new music that we’d like and how poorly they pay musicians, we would surely stop using the service and go back to traditional methods of buying and listening to music.

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Jul 01, 2019 Kevin Hodgson rated it really liked it

Fascinating look at the streaming music world, and a single company constantly repositioning itself, through an active research lens ... complete with complaints from Spotify itself about the ways the research was conducted with bots and fake record labels as a means to track the flow of data ...

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Jun 30, 2019 Andrei Goncharov rated it really liked it

Minus one star for the way it’s written: after all, it’s a research documentation, not a detective story.

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Apr 10, 2020 Aj Sharma rated it did not like it

Dry, and uninteresting.

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Jun 23, 2020 Fer Grajales rated it liked it

Recommends it for: Musicians, producers,managers, a&r

Shelves: music-books

It does give a little glimpse into Spotify's complex machinery but I thought there was going to be a more "friendly" approach on how to use this information. I wouldn't say this book is a must, maybe is extra reading material for people working in the music business. My point of view as a music producer is that I got some insight but not very practical. ...more

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