`Contents`

List of Figures

Figure 0.1

Spotify London subway advertisement in November 2016. Photograph by the authors.

Figure 0.2

Spotify once described itself as a platform to manage one’s music—but should it still be seen as one? Advertisement for the “Discover Weekly” playlist in the New York City subway in 2016. Photograph by the authors.

Figure 0.3

Former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister Carl Bildt speaks at the #backaspotify event at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce on April 22, 2016. Image courtesy of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

Figure 0.4

An extended but graphically simplified network of some of the most frequent tweeters during the #backaspotify campaign.

Figure 0.5

“Sweden needs fast-growing companies more than they need Sweden. #backaspotify”—Tweet from Annie Lööf, leader of the Swedish Centre Party, on April 15, 2016. Image courtesy of the Centre Party.

Figure 0.6

#backaspotify and the local production of memes: “Vad är problemet?” (What’s the problem?), the Swedish prime minister and Social Democrat, Stefan Löfven, asks in a twitter meme from @Rodgronrora.

Figure 1.1

During the autumn of 2009, Spotify launched its first mobile music app for the Apple iPhone.

Figure 1.2

A screenshot of the Spotify Premium interface in 2011.

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

An influence on Spotify’s later mood boards, Songza’s mobile interface offered “activities” at different times of the week. Screenshots from 2012.

Figure 1.5

Self-produced “music” for research purposes: in 2014, the authors of this book released the album Election Music under the nom de plume Heinz Duthel.

Figure 1.6

Swedish breakfast recordings were released under the pseudonym Fru Kost (frukost is “breakfast” in Swedish)—self-produced “music” for research purposes uploaded through the music aggregator Record Union. Notably, the popularity of the song “Kaffe” (coffee) was mainly due to our multiple preprogrammed bots.

Figure 2.1

Ad for Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” in the New York subway in 2016. Photograph by the authors.

Figure 2.2

Aggregation as the facilitating principle behind streaming: online offers made by the music aggregation service Awal. Screenshot provided by authors.

Figure 2.3

In March 2014, the funk band Vulfpeck released the conceptual album Sleepify—which contained some five minutes of pure silence—in order to crowdfund the Sleepify Tour. Screenshot provided by authors.

Figure 2.4

Figure 2.5

Stills from the promotional YouTube video for the Sleepify Tour, with bandleader Jack Stratton asking fans to stream the album on repeat (while sleeping!). Reprinted with permission from Vulfpeck.

Figure 2.6

Five “song loops” on Spotify Radio, as listened to by one of our preprogrammed bots. The radio loop began with ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” (in the middle) and repeated the same track an additional five times (during a twenty-four-hour intervention).

Figure 2.7

Screenshot of Wireshark in action. Black rows indicate failed TCP packet transmissions.

Figure 2.8

List of actors that were found when we eavesdropped on Spotify’s network traffic in May 2017.

Figure 3.1

Home page of the Spotify desktop client, as seen from a US listener account in May 2017.

Figure 3.2

Spotify’s top eight Genres & Moods categories, as seen from a Swedish account in May 2017.

Figure 3.3

Spotify’s top eight Mood playlists, as seen from a US account in June 2017.

Figure 3.4

Was the introduction of a nonbinary gender option in the fall of 2016 a token of progressiveness or market-driven appropriateness?

Figure 3.5

Spotify Rewind: unique artist recommendations as a percentage of each age group’s total artist recommendations.

Figure 3.6

Spotify Rewind: unique artist recommendations for individual bots as a percentage of each bot’s total artist recommendations.

Figure 3.7

The interface used to facilitate research in some of the case studies.

Spotify media event, New York, May 20, 2015. Photographs by the authors.

Figure 4.5

Fiddler in action, sniffing out communication between Spotify and its ad-supplying partners.

Figure 4.6

Figure 4.7

Stills from the Songblocker promotion video, uploaded to YouTube during the spring of 2017.

Figure 5.1

A world map of Spotify job listings, with New York and Stockholm offering the greatest number of positions. Image courtesy by OpenStreetMapContributors.

Figure 5.2

Screenshot of Spotify’s “Our Job Categories” web page as of June 2017.

Figure 5.3

Distribution of job postings among different countries, with shading indicating locations with the greatest number of jobs, comparatively.