Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music by Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, et al. (review)

Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and mistitled book. Studying firms like Spotify is notoriously challenging: it is practically impossible for researchers (especially those with critical orientations) to gain access to the code or the offices that we might envision as the "insides" of such organizations. The present book is no exception: in spite of a large, prestigious grant from the Swedish government, the authors found their early entreaties to Spotify rebuffed and ignored (1, 182). Undaunted, they embraced what they call an "attitude of outsideness" (190), reframing their lack of access as a virtue, avoiding "a formal procedure of gatekeeper introduction" that, they claim, "would have limited and biased the research" (2). 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.

As the book's structure, acknowledgments, and quintuple authorship make clear, it is the outcome of a rangy set of projects that try to apprehend Spotify from many different positions. Each of the book's chapters and research vignettes can be understood as a study of one aspect of Spotify's exterior: one studies an online Swedish political campaign that is aimed at keeping the company's job growth in the country; another captures the network traffic that the client software sends out into a tangle of advertising servers; another analyzes a corpus of the company's job postings, examining them for clues about corporate values and future directions.

These efforts are most interesting in aggregate as potential research directions that others might pursue further; together, they usefully refigure Spotify as a "changing, interspersed, multidirectional" entity (15), not simply a piece of software with a stable function or a company with an enduring mission. Individually, these projects are uneven. One of the more interesting interventions describes the authors' attempt to put their own music on Spotify: they discover that third-party aggregator services play an important role in shaping what makes it into the catalog and what metadata come with it. Others, like the analysis of job postings that finds "the most commonly used adjectives were better, strong, free, proud, new, global, creative, and excellent" (200), are anticlimactic.

The most promising and successful of the book's approaches is the telling of Spotify's history through its rounds of venture funding. Reframing the story of Spotify through its finances rather than its features allows the authors to show how the cultural framing of "music streaming" has changed as Spotify has sought the funding necessary to run for over a decade without making a profit. The limits of this method become evident, however, as the book strains to find causal relationships between funding and platform change: new features are described as "certainly not Spotify's own idea" (51) or "apparently, a main condition of the investment deal" (55), unnecessarily and speculatively reducing the complexity of organizational decision-making to singular economic causes. Nonetheless, the history traced here will be of interest to readers who want to learn how companies like Spotify are embedded in financial markets.

The book begins and ends with the story of a legal threat: in response to the authors' use of automated "bot" accounts for studying patterns in algorithmic recommendation, Spotify sent them a cease and desist notice while also notifying their funder—a threat to academic research that was rightfully met with public outrage at the time. Ironically, this large response was occasioned by one of the book's least informative methods. These...