Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music
by Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, & Patrick Vonderau
First posted May 2019
I’m still using Spotify as much as ever. Moreso?
It’s challenging to live outside of the prevalent social systems of the time.
Self-justification for bad behavior? Never heard of 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 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 of proprietary value-add grows fainter and fainter when it is only 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 targeted 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 mood-bended playlists, but as far as factual answers go, Teardown danced around 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’re eating, as long as that consumption is measurable.