Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (Mit Press)

The authors of this book are highly-credentialed but don't seem to think very clearly when it comes to matters about business. They tend to treat marketplace businesses as the same as businesses where the supply is under monolithic control.They also waste a lot of time and space on highly-technical matters like running Wireshark on the Spotify Desktop client. I'm a software engineer and I think this is cool, but there isn't a whole lot in the pcaps when it comes to corporate strategy.

Smallest type i've ever seen in a book and the information can leave you a little confused at times, but if you're in the music industry you NEED to know this info. Spotify isn't what they claim to be and have become a necessary evil .. emphasis on evil .If you want to know the inner workings of business Period , then you need to get this book .

Every suspicion or speculation I have had about Spotify over the years was revealed in a methodical, thoroughly thought out, well researched way by a team of intellectuals not afraid to play outside the box to gain valuable insight into, not only Spotify, but tech companies that develop “platforms” running on layers of algorithms, AI and machine learning; and what that really means beneath the surface. Every music industry professional NEEDS to read this book.

It tells you what's needed to know about streaming services

Absolutely essential read for anyone working in the music industry.

“Black box” has had an entirely different meaning in the music industry for decades - I should have researched better

More technical than expected. Lost the narrative.

Most of this book could have been written by a 16 year old kid who learnt how to code over the weekend. They examine small facets of the spotify platform with bots and pretend their tidbits of information are important. There was no analysis of the financials, no proper full scale analysis of the platform (how would the COO see it rather than how some random user sees it), no analysis of how music propagates or its popularity bounces between groups, no analysis of how the music gets on the platform, how the deals are done, how the engineers are hired, etc.The book is 200 pages because they've taken their poor analysis and made it verbose, dedicating 10 pages to describing what Wireshark is, and how they used it to find the spotify CDNs? This could change next month and it means nothing.They wrote the book with as much verbiage as a nonsense academic paper, the meat of whatever they had to present could probably be written on one page.I would recommend not wasting your time, you will not learn much from reading this book.

While the first couple of chapters about Spotify's history are easy to read, the book is clearly written for an academic audience, spending a good amount of space to explain methodology and results of the investigation, making it a bit hard to read.

Excellent 360° analysis of one of the biggest platforms in the contemporary economy.

Spotify Teardown is an insightful glimpse into inner workings of Spotify, but lacks the critical argument and risk, an academic work ought to make. Eriksson knows this, but published anyways. Years of research ought to accomplish something, and yet ST is less about ethnography, and more about the process of research methodology.While its observations, and Interventions, are interesting, they lack the "so what?" every academic must take a stand on, otherwise, the result is a little more than esoteric journalism.I cannot recommend this book to the reader looking to gain some critical insight about Spotify, but perhaps for an avid reader looking to pat themselves on the back for making it through 200 pages of otherwise unremarkable academic jargon.

It seems, that different people have written different chapters of the book. Some parts of the book are written in a completely unreadable manner. Sentences that span over 6-10 Rows with a lot of complicated technical expressions. If you're familiar with those kind of layeresque writing and tons of highly specialized technical words, you'll be satisfied. Honestly, I think a lot of the stuff, described in the book could have been written a lot more comprehensible.

Ho acquistato questo volume per approfondire la conoscenza di Spotify e scoprire il suo approccio basato sui dati per creare contenuti personalizzati per gli utenti. Ho trovato il volume molto utile come fonte per un mio elaborato universitario, in quanto ricco di informazioni e fonti autorevoli. Consigliato!