11/28/2023 0 Comments Teardown real estate lingo![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Close examination of music’s representation in such marketing discourse underlines how it too has been transformed by the logic of user monitoring and commodification. Notable in this respect is how music figures into marketing campaigns directed not at consumers, but at prospective advertisers and investors. While previous research has indicated how various features, functionalities, and interfaces serve to distinguish competing services, less attention has been paid to the way they position themselves vis-à-vis other new media companies also trading in user data and user-commodities. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. This has impelled Pandora, Spotify and others to develop alternative means of extracting value from users. Yet online streaming’s promise of remonetizing musical commodities previously demonetized by practices of file sharing has been called into doubt by difficulties in converting users of advertising-based “freemium” services into paying subscribers. Key catalysts in the transition from ownership- to access-based models of music distribution, services like Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, and others have positioned themselves as a means whereby listeners may be reintegrated into a “digital enclosure,” a space over which rights holders can exercise greater control. This article explores questions of music use, commodification, and online surveillance in cloud-based music streaming services. This article concludes with an examination of how commercial imperatives shape 'ways of seeing' and 'algorithmic individuation' on music streaming platforms. In particular, ways of seeing are heavily influenced by the consumer categories that are defined and demanded by advertisers. Then, drawing from Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, it demonstrates how ways of seeing the individual work to enact the individual on these platforms. It first conducts a comparison of how two leading streaming platforms conceive of the individual music listener. This article explores this idea by taking a closer look at online music streaming services. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people as individuals. In an age of personalized media, the word 'masses' seems like an anachronism. Raymond Williams once wrote, '… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses'. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use the company later threatened their research funding. 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, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. ![]() Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. ![]()
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