Maria Eriksson and Pelle Snickars (Umeå universitet, Sweden)

Guest seminar with

Maria Eriksson and Pelle Snickars

Umeå universitet, Sweden

co-auteurs with Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson and Patrick Vonderau of the book

Spotify Teardown

Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music


NB: this session is exceptionally scheduled from 1pm to 3pm.


Introduction to the discussion by Loïc Riom


An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify’s product and the way it is commonly understood.

Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.

Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify’s “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors’ innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.



The Guest Seminar Series is organized collectively by the CSI PhD students. It is open upon registration.

Contact and registration: Félix Boilève or Clément Gasull

Date: Tuesday February 12, 2019, 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Venue: Mines ParisTech, 60 bd St Michel, 75006 Paris – Room St Jacques


Guest seminar programme



Photo credit: Maria Eriksson, Streaming Heritage – Pelle Snickars, Umeå universitet.