This book and the research on which it is based have benefited from much collaboration. Christopher Kullenberg joined us during the early stages of the project and contributed vitally to one of the chapters in this book. We are deeply indebted to system developer Roger Mähler and the resourceful staff at Humlab, Umeå University, especially Johan von Boer, Andreas Marklund, and Fredrik Palm. Their enthusiasm and inventiveness inspired the trajectory of our research and analysis from start to finish and helped to guide the course of our inquiry.
This book also has benefitted from the insights of an extraordinary community of interlocutors. Our thanks to all the professionals in the advertising, digital media, and IT industries who took the time to explain and reflect upon their work and practices and to Mollie Panzner (Ghostery/Evidon) for expert advice on mapping ad tech networks. We would like to thank Jennifer Holt and Lisa Parks for hosting us at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in November 2015, as well as Kristoffer Gansing for inviting us to present Songblocker to an unsuspecting crowd at Transmediale—Festival for Art and Digital Culture 2017 in Berlin. David Hesmondhalgh, Geert Lovink, Bernhard Rieder, Richard Rogers, Christian Sandvig and Mirko Tobias Schaefer provided invaluable advice on legal and ethical matters.
An extensive constellation of colleagues, peers, and friends sustained and enriched this project through its different iterations. In addition to the valuable feedback we gleaned from audiences at the diverse conferences, workshops, and lectures where we presented pieces of the work, we had the good fortune to receive input from Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Joshua Braun, John Thornton Caldwell, Abigail and Benjamin De Kosnik, Andrew Leyshon, Ramon Lobato, Denise Mann, Paul McDonald, Jeremy Wade Morris, Alisa Perren, and Cornelius Puschmann. Somewhat closer to home, we also would like to thank C. F. Helgesson, Sofia Johansson, Hans Kjellberg, Ivy Kunze, Susanna af Leijonhufvud, Johan Lindquist, Anette Nykvist, Christian Rossipal, and Jonas Andersson Schwarz, as well as Francis Lee, Steve Woolgar, and the Algorithm Study Network for their curiosity, inspiration, and suggestions. We are especially grateful to Holger Schulze and Pit Schultz for discussing ideas in the earliest phase of the project and to Dan McHale for his generous hospitality during our stay in San Francisco.
We have been fortunate to have editorial assistance during the production of this book. In this respect, we owe much gratitude to Heather Macdougall and especially Joshua Boydstun. Gita Devi Manaktala, Doug Sery, and Noah J. Springer provided determined support from beginning to end. We are grateful to our anonymous readers, who offered helpful feedback. Our greatest thanks go to the Swedish Research Council/Vetenskapsrådet (Framework Grant scheme, D0113901) for generous funding of our project over the past four years and to the colleagues and administrators at Umeå University and Stockholm University for their enduring support.
Other versions of some of the materials and ideas presented in this book appeared in the following books and articles:
Eriksson, Maria. “Close Reading Big Data: The Echo Nest and the Production of (Rotten) Music Metadata.” First Monday 21, no. 7 (2016), doi:10.5210/fm.v21i7.6303.
Eriksson, Maria. “Unpacking Online Streams.” APRJA special issue on Research Values (forthcoming, 2018).
Eriksson, Maria, and Anna Johansson. “‘Keep Smiling!’: Time, Functionality and Intimacy in Spotify’s Featured Playlists.” Cultural Analysis 16, no. 1 (2018): 68–84.
Eriksson, Maria, and Anna Johansson. “Tracking Gendered Streams.” Culture Unbound 9, no. 2 (2017): 163–183. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1792163.
Fleischer, Rasmus. “If the Song Has No Price, Is It Still a Commodity? Rethinking the Commodification of Digital Music.” Culture Unbound 9, no. 2 (2017): 146–162. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1792146.
Fleischer, Rasmus. “Nätutopier och nätdystopier: Om 2000-talets sökande efter internets väsen” [Network utopias and dystopias: The search for the essence of the internet in the 2000s]. In Samtider: Perspektiv på 2000-talets idéhistoria [Contemporary times: Perspective on the history of ideas in the 2000s], edited by Anders Burman and Lena Lennerhed, 261–303. Gothenburg, Sweden: Bokförlaget Daidalos, 2017.
Fleischer, Rasmus. “Swedish Music Export: The Making of a Miracle.” In Made in Sweden: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Alf Björnberg and Thomas Bossius, 153–162. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Fleischer, Rasmus. “Towards a Postdigital Sensibility: How to Get Moved by Too Much Music.” Culture Unbound 7, no. 2 (2015): 255–269. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1572255.
Fleischer, Rasmus, and Pelle Snickars. “Discovering Spotify—A Thematic Introduction.” Culture Unbound 9, no. 2 (2017): 130–145. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1792130.
Fleischer, Rasmus, and Pelle Snickars. Den svenska enhörningen: Storyn om Spotify. Stockholm: Mondial, 2018.
Mähler, Roger, and Patrick Vonderau. “Studying Ad Targeting with Digital Methods: The Case of Spotify.” Culture Unbound 9, no. 2 (2017): 212–221. doi:10.3384/cu .2000.1525.1792212.
Snickars, Pelle. “More Music is Better Music.” In Business Innovation and Disruption in the Music Industry, edited by Patrik Wikström and Robert DeFillippi, 191–210. Cheltenham, UK: Edgar Elgar, 2016.
Snickars, Pelle. “More of the Same—On Spotify Radio.” Culture Unbound 9, no. 2 (2017): 184–211. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1792184.
Snickars, Pelle, and Roger Mähler. “SpotiBot—Turing Testing Spotify.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12, no. 2 (2018).
Vonderau, Patrick. “‘Where Ideas Are Free’: Scientific Knowledge in the Algorithm Economy.” Media Fields Journal, no. 10 (2015). http://
Vonderau, Patrick. “The Politics of Content Aggregation.” Television & New Media 16, no. 8 (2015): 717–733. doi:10.1177/1527476414554402.
Vonderau, Patrick. “The Video Bubble: Multichannel Networks and the Transformation of YouTube.” Convergence 22, no. 4 (2016): 361–375. doi:10.1177/1354856516641882.
Vonderau, Patrick. “The Politics of Content Aggregation.” Television & New Media 16, no. 8 (2015): 717–733. doi:10.1177/1527476414554402.
Vonderau, Patrick. “The Spotify Effect: Digital Distribution and Financial Growth.” Television & New Media, November 21, 2017. doi:10.1177/1527476417741200.
Vonderau, Patrick. “Technology and Language, or, How to Apply Media Industries Research?” In Applied Media Studies, edited by Kirsten Ostherr, 127–140. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Vonderau, Patrick. “Access and Mistrust in Media Industries Research.” In Making Media: Production, Practices and Professions, edited by Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018 (in press).