Intervention: Introducing Songblocker
In February 2017, during the thirtieth transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, a new application was launched: Songblocker.1 In line with classic tech startup jargon, the app was introduced as a “groundbreaking application” that would “revolutionize the way people listen to and enjoy ads.” Functioning as a Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X plugin, Songblocker’s declared allure was its ability to automatically mute songs on Spotify and instead allow its users to enjoy “100% awesome ads.” Following startup lingo, Songblocker was claimed to be “more than just a blocker.” Indeed, company representatives insisted on Songblocker’s capacity to make the world a better place by “empowering users and unleashing their inner advertisers.” Set against what was described as an ongoing (and scandalous) act of antiadvertising terrorism against the music industries, Songblocker presented itself as the morally correct opposite of ad blocking: a service that would put an end to the uncontrolled financial bleed that torments online content providers.
Before the transmediale event, stickers, T-shirts, and coffee cups with the Songblocker logo had been specially ordered, along with a glossy video ad that featured happy teens swimming and riding bikes, accompanied by taglines such as “connect,” “friendship,” and “curiosity.”2 Songblocker did not just claim to have reversed the functions of two previously existing ad blockers, “putting their technology to much better use,” it also allegedly catered to a generation of internet users who had yet to experience the truly amazing qualities of ads. At the core of Songblocker’s corporate ethics lay a strong belief in the potential of supporting online content publishers by exposing oneself to ads—and ads alone. “No music. No disturbance,” as the business jingle would have it. Songblocker’s corporate model was presented as easily scalable and capable of supporting an “entire media industry under attack by adblockers.” At the transmediale launch, one cofounder even exclaimed—with increasing enthusiasm—that: “Songblocker is just the start. Imagine what comes next. Newsblocker! Filmblocker! Bookblocker! Artblocker! Pornblocker! Wikiblocker! Tweetblocker! Blogblocker! Friendblocker! Cashblocker! And, you know … Foodblocker! Whatever! The opportunities for supporting high-quality content are unlimited.”3
Figure 4.6
Songblocker, in short, envisioned a future where everyone would be happy to pay for access to ads—and just the ads. By calling this a strategy for “turning commercial speech into economies of scale,” the company was explicit about seeing advertising as one of the largest untapped resources on the planet. Painting a dreamy (and dollar-laden) image of times ahead, Songblocker’s representatives were aggressively fishing for venture capital investors who were prepared to open their wallets for the newest—and presumably hottest—tech startup to emerge out of Sweden. Finally, the audience was told, “Songblocker will do for Spotify what Spotify did for the music industry!”
In due time, Songblocker established a presence on Twitter (@songblocker), with this account description: “Tech startup reconceptualizing the experience of listening. Songblocker gives you 100% ads when listening to Spotify. No music. No disturbance. Full support.”4 The company also set up a Facebook page and engaged in a social media campaign that culminated in Songblocker’s promotional video on YouTube receiving more than sixteen thousand views. However, doubts were also raised. As one commentator, HampStamp, stated on YouTube: “This has to be a joke.”5
Figure 4.7
Stills from the Songblocker promotion video, uploaded to YouTube during the spring of 2017.
HampStamp was correct. As readers might suspect, Songblocker was nothing but a hoax: a fictitious startup designed by us researchers to intervene, discuss, and problematize some of the moral imperatives that have begun to emerge around online content and its monetization by ads. We ourselves portrayed the startup prophets at transmediale (poorly disguised in Songblocker T-shirts). The sixteen thousand views of the YouTube promotional video were obtained by buying fake likes and views from specially selected click farms in Indonesia. Moreover, while the Songblocker plugin is downloadable, fully functional, and available at songblocker.com,6 the company’s promise of a premium version was never meant to materialize—most likely to the great disappointment of those who wanted to “skip all silence between ads, listen to ads in an offline mode, share ads with the people you love, and receive free ad recommendations based on moods, genres, and your personal taste.”7
Within our research project, we approached the Songblocker intervention as a form of ethnographic speculation. The aim of the experiment was not to generate results. Rather, we wanted to engage in the kinds of speculative methods we discussed in the introduction to this book, methods that have been proposed by Luciana Parisi, Nina Wakeford, Celia Lury, and others.8 Such methods privilege imagination, narrational mutations, and adventurous methodological journeys on the path toward exploring digital technologies and triggering discussions. The presentation at transmediale prompted some critical conversations, both at the actual launch and within media. One of us researchers was, for example, interviewed by NPR Berlin. “Our research project is designed to be playful in some ways. That kind of hackerish attitude is necessary if you want to get information about these [secretive] companies,” we stated. “The academic … team is using ‘Songblocker’ as a metaphor to describe the strange new economic conditions of streaming music in the digital age, and the role of advertising and ad-blocking.”9
Songblocker thus became a tool for us to not only map and describe but also intervene in the ad-tech infrastructures that are built around streamed music. Rather than simply depicting the kinds of data traffic that advertising on streaming platforms gives rise to, we wanted to find ways of participating in that traffic while simultaneously problematizing its basic premises. In short, we committed to an agenda that was both skeptical and interventionist. Integrating the construction of an actual digital tool—the Songblocker plugin—with autoethnographic observations (as we took on the characters of startup prophets) and a performance at transmediale, we wanted to explore the role of ads in processes of commodification around streamed music. We also sought to directly engage with the ethics and subjectivities that current ad-tech markets rely on and foster.
Ad blockers have challenged visions of how content provision on the web can become financially profitable. They have been a hot topic for years, with ad-blocker developers arguing that any ad-supported medium is “abusing its readers.” Publishers, in turn, have repeatedly stated that blocking ads is “tantamount to theft.” Both sides have, in cat-and-mouse fashion, “experimented with blocks and counter-blocks, culminating in sites simply blocking all users with an adblocker turned on.”10 Ad blockers are often free plugins that work by filtering out distracting ads on websites or in desktop clients. But ad blockers also serve other purposes. For example, they help save bandwidth so that web pages can load faster and with less battery usage. In the Swedish context, it has been argued that the latter is a distinct benefit for online public service media (without advertisements) compared to commercial news sites, since the former load much more quickly. Most ad blockers also protect privacy, since they prohibit the transmission of personal information to third-party ad agencies. In addition, ad blockers may provide security, since they filter out ads that nowadays may contain malicious code. Ad blocking thus goes beyond simply filtering out unwanted ads and instead taps into wider concerns about integrity, surveillance, and usability on the web.
As we have already stated, the introduction of ad blockers has been controversial. In May 2015, for example, Martin Bryant openly stated that “adblockers are immoral.”11 Bryant voiced strong resentment for people who “starve” content providers by using ad blockers and called such behavior snobbish, shameful, and a display of “either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities.”12 Bryant is not alone in his critique. Ad blocking has been likened to theft, eliciting the claim that “every time you block an ad, what you’re really blocking is food from entering a child’s mouth.”13 Similarly, ad blocking has been described as a deeply violent practice that could cause a “bloodbath of independent media.”14 In the autumn of 2015, Marco Arment—the creator of a highly popular ad blocker called Peace—even removed his software from Apple’s App Store, followed by a public announcement on his blog stating that he did not “feel good” about being responsible for an app that could potentially “hurt” content providers from gaining ad revenue.15
Ad blocking, then, is far from an uncontested solution for modifying how web content is displayed. It is a technology that is deeply entangled in moralistic arguments about our rights and obligations as consumers of online content. At the heart of these conflicts lies the question of whether advertising buyers have the right to expect that their content will reach all the way to its aimed destination (i.e., the eyes or ears of individual humans). In other words, ad blocking touches on issues concerning property owners’ right to be seen or—in the case of audio ads—the right to be heard.16
However, with respect to ads, the internet is still akin to the Wild West, at least compared to the physical media world. Advertising regulations stipulate, for example, that “zones between the billboard and the roadway [should be] kept free of visual obstructions” in order to ensure that advertisements can work effectively in analog space.17 These kinds of regulations prevent governments and corporations from planting trees or building houses that could visually block advertisements. But similar regulations do not yet exist in digital space, thus leaving room for various kinds of ad blockers. In February 2017, the anti-ad-blocking company PageFair estimated that software for blocking ads is put to use on over 600 million mobile and desktop devices globally.18
In recent years, ad blocking has also opened up a kind of arms race, in which a number of companies have begun to offer anti-ad-blocking software to the publishing industries.19 Companies such as Admiral and Sourcepoint sell various kinds of analytics packages for tracking ad-blocking losses, and they also supply solutions for circumventing ad blockers.20 In turn, these have given rise to anti-anti-ad-blocking measures, which have then been subverted, and so on. To some extent, the battle has been set between major hardware and software companies such as Apple and Google.21 Apple, on the one hand, has reasons to promote the use of ad blockers, which cater to its users’ desires and make Apple’s hardware devices run faster (and with less battery usage). Actors such as Google, on the other hand, naturally want to ban ad blocking, since they rely heavily on ad revenues.
To further complicate the matter, some ad-blocking companies have started to take on ambiguous and somewhat corrupt roles. Companies such as the German based Eyeo, which runs the highly popular ad blocker Adblock Plus, has been likened to an extortion racket because it lets advertising companies pay to pass through its filters. By launching a controversial “acceptable ads program”—which allows “some advertisements through its adblocking software, often in exchange for a cut of the revenue received from the ads”22—Eyeo has attracted substantial criticism. Here, ad blockers have become yet another part of the ad-tech industry. Indeed, they function like new kinds of advertising middlemen who bring to the fore the controversies and conflicts of interest within the current ad-tech business.
Our Songblocker intervention tapped into these controversial debates around ad blockers. Importantly, the plugin could be built because of Spotify’s surprisingly straightforward ways of disclosing metadata about its streamed content. As it turns out, each of Spotify’s data streams includes a special metadata indicator that discloses whether an advertisement or a musical track is being transmitted. We cannot say why Spotify makes ad blocking so simple, but the ease does indicate that if Spotify found ad blocking to be a real problem, it most likely would have fought back by not giving away such metadata. Unlike many news outlets, then, Spotify does not currently appear to consider ad blocking to be a serious threat to its business model.
Online there are plenty of tutorials on how to block and override the domain name servers (DNS) that are hosting Spotify advertisment. Broadly speaking, there are two possible types of ad blockers: those that hinder the dissemination of ads by blocking the servers from which such content originates, and those that single out ads from other types of content on the web and then simply hide them from the user. Ad blockers that work by blocking servers largely exist because digital services outsource the function of publishing ads to third-party ad-tech companies. This means that if, say, news content is delivered to users from one server, the ads might originate from entirely different servers. Some ad blockers take advantage of this by simply identifying and whitelisting servers that distribute the desired content, while blacklisting or blocking servers that distribute ads. The second type of ad blockers—to which Songblocker belongs—basically works because metadata transfers make it possible to single out ads from other types of content. In order for this to work, a computer has to be able to locate and recognize advertising content, often in real time. This is tricky—unless content providers directly disclose if content consists of ads or not.
In building our blocker for audio content, all we did was to use Spotify’s metadata to locate advertisements (and music), and then tell a computer to turn the volume up or down based on the results. Together with the programmers at Humlab, we created Songblocker based on two currently existing Spotify ad blockers (EZblocker and Spotifree) and simply adjusted their open-source code so that the volume was put on mute when music was played, instead of the other way around.23 The Songblocker plugin was thus an inverted ad blocker, the result of pushing anti-ad-blocking logics and measures to their extreme. The process of building it involved a number of questions: Would it be possible to create a means for users to support content providers by fully and singlehandedly consuming their ads? What could we learn from different ad blockers’ attempts to rewire the functions and economic organizations of online services? And how could we reuse their software to ask other types of questions about the commodification of streamed music and its usage?
When discussing Spotify’s advertising scheme, it is important to know that it represents a form of programmatic advertising (explained in chapter 4). To be a Songblocker user thus implies linking up to a vast infrastructure of automated ad sales, but with no evident aesthetic gain, since all music has been silenced. Thereby, Songblocker users are encouraged to engage in “full adtech immersion.” In a digital climate where advertising is aggressively pushed toward users, this would involve consuming ads for the sake of ads as an act of solidarity with online content producers and providers.
Thus, what Songblocker brings forward is a kind of advertising dystopia—or utopia, depending on one’s perspective—in which conventional, quality content (films, books, news, music) and its digital distributors (Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and so on) are rewarded but simultaneously also pushed to the side to the benefit of advertising per se. Importantly, the aim of creating such a situation was not to generate images of an alternative present that would appear as wholly true and believable. Instead, Songblocker’s apparent artifice was designed to give rise to reflection and discussion. To what extent are we obliged to read, view, and listen to the content that streaming services and other online content distributors provide to us? And what informal and moral contracts between users and distributors are currently forming in the digital sphere? Indeed, the absurdity of Songblocker’s promotional materials was cliché enough to avoid any misconceptions: Songblocker was, and continues to be, a parody of itself and a critique of ad tech, as well as startup culture. The commentator HampStamp on YouTube was indeed correct: “This has to be a joke.”
As a whole, the Songblocker intervention can thus be read as a methodological provocation that, in the words of John-David Dewsbury, is “productive, that proliferates, and [that] creates … interferences”—interferences with the moral imperatives of digital monetization strategies and interferences with Spotify’s technical structure and software affordances.24 The intervention also reveals how research may not only reflect and comment on contemporary affairs but also, much like anecdotes, serve as an “instrumentation and a feature of, the making of ‘out theres.’”25 This new “out there” may be purely fictional and speculative, yet it also invites contemplation of our cultural and historical condition. In the end, the Songblocker intervention represents more than just an example of how other people’s attempts to tamper with, and transform, Spotify’s original features can be repurposed for critical media research. It has also opened up a context for broadly (re)considering the kinds of advertisement logics that streamed music relies on.