Spotify Teardown

tags :: R:music, R:music-industry, R:music-tech, R:book

• Introduction/Swedish Unicorn Looks at the network of people participating in #backaspotify, and traces the ad-tech roots of Spotify as a company. Also looks at their attempt at politically strong-arming housing policies to support their employees in moving to Sweden

• Where is Spotify? Questions the extent to which Spotify is truly sweden, or truly a music-tech company It does so by following the various funding phases and how the company transformed itself to secure funding from wherever it was available. This chapter also goes over how the three biggest record labels - Sony, Warner and Universal control a majority of Spotify, essentially making it very susceptible to perpetuating existing problems that exist within the record industry

• Intervention: Record Label Setup This chapter talks about the authors going poking the spotify system by setting up a record label and interacting with aggregator systems to understand the flow of music

  • Compares various aggregator services and their pricing setup
  • Metadata fundamentally influences how streamed music moves, because they underlie recommendation algorithms and other bundling methods. It is extremely difficult to find or sell sell without it.
  • Aggregators perform crucial role of prompting and collecting such metadata - making music and artists ‘algorithm ready’

• Where do files become music

  • Studies metadata that travels through the system with music
  • Studies Spotify’s old P2P delivery
  • Aggregation is a generic term for the internet’s capacity to pull content from various sources and make it acessible at dedicated sites
  • Awal bundles digital and intellectual property rights - copyrights to sound recordings and artists’/performers’ rights. Delivers content to digital music stores, either in the form of downloading or streaming. Aggregators hence operate on the b2b - one group are record labels/artists, and the other digital music stores.
  • Aggregators have some amount of agency on declaring whether or not tracks count as music.

• Intervention: How We Tracked Streams

  • Outlines the infrastructure around data collection and the various bits of metrics that tend to be collected
  • Information on CDN architecture and the various entities involved in streaming music
  • R:eavesdropping is a deeply biological trait with ancient roots - John L Locke
  • “Information propagates by autonomously finding lines of least resistance” - Tiziana Terranova

• How Does Spotify Package Music?

  • Focus on UI, branding, playlisting etc
  • Playlists as disaggregated albums
  • Change of curation into a marketting term for taste-making and gatekeeping.
  • Soundtracking your life with spotify - utilitarian approach to music - ubiquitous listening
  • Perpetuates the positive psychology discourse around happiness being a result of cognitive outlook
  • Spotify moodboards are a reproduction of neoliberal subjectivity - embrace values associated with consumption, self-transformation and notions of choice
  • Algorithms operate prescriptively, and attribute arbitrary meanings to human behavior

• What is the value of free?

  • Digital cultures often owes its cultural specificity to the absence of a revenue model
  • “Free” is premised on the notion that the exchange value of cultural production can be neglected
  • How much is R:art worth?
  • Markets are mobilizers of production in networks of continuing flows, as opposed to isolated transactions
  • Spotify turned online music distribution into media company and then into stock options - which is a martket it has no control on
  • Spotify’s MO of brokerage and arbitrage
  • Studies Programmatic Advertising and R:adtech architecture - the auctioning system and costs involved

• Songblocker

  • An experimental app that blocks all content, and only allowing ads. Speculates that this is the end game for all digital media