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Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau. Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019. mitpress.mit. edu
Spotify Teardown is possibly the most comprehensive study about the streaming giant that you can get your hands on today. The five authors from Sweden, along with their technical computing group from the HUMlab at the Umeå University, is perhaps the top team of experts in the world with the credentials and enough insight to write an academic book on the inner working of streaming music and the policy implications related to those services. It is based on a $1 million study funded by the Swedish Research Council to investigate and challenge the quid pro quo of streaming services such as Spotify. The study ran from Fall 2013 to Summer 2017 and yielded an impressive twenty-one top peer-reviewed articles! The book is a hybrid between a dissertation and a compilation of academic articles but do not let this dissuade you from reading it. To my surprise, it was a really fast and entertaining read.
The book revolves around four chapters. The first offers a fascinating historical time line...