"Spotify Teardown": What Spotify Doesn't Want You To Know
- Amie Martinez
- Mar 29, 2021
- 3 min read
MC7019: Week 11 Blog
Just like a lot of other college and graduate students across the nation, I listen to Spotify pretty much every day. It's easily accessible on my desktop and phone, and Premium for Students was a deal I just couldn't pass up. Who doesn't love to listen to some chill, lo-fi beats during work or jam out to throwback songs (or the Hamilton soundtrack) in the car? On the surface, Spotify seems to be nothing more than a platform to manage music. However, five researchers who spent several years investigating the inner workings of Spotify would argue that the company acts "not only as a music provider but also as a private data broker." Their book, "Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music" uncovers how the global company operates as a giant, mass media actor that deserves as much scrutiny as Facebook and Google.
The researchers uncovered a lot of information about Spotify through interviews, observations and a covert, undercover investigation on the backend of the platform (much to Spotify's chagrin). They saw firsthand that the platform doesn't hide the fact that it knows what its users are listening to all the time and how that plays into their daily lives. This finding is most visible to us users when we receive our "Spotify Wrapped" at the end of the year.
Rather than only focusing on soundtracks and new releases for organization purposes, Spotify centers its user interface around behaviors, moods and feelings. Spotify also includes all this information in their own promotions and advertisements. Take, for example, their recent ad for Taylor Swift's song "August." Through an apparent user testimony, Spotify related how her song got people through 2020 and how users wished it was out when the COVID-19 pandemic began. I understand the sentiment and how it relates to so many people, but I also understand how creepy it is how Spotify can directly relate song choice of a large group of users to outside experiences. This advertisement isn't the only one that uses this strategy, either.
On top of this, Spotify sells all these patterns and personal data to advertisers. Spotify, in short, acts just like any other media giant. As the researchers put it:
Spotify, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can indeed be regarded as media companies that sell audiences to advertisers, implying legal responsibility for the content disseminated through their interfaces.
Found in every chapter of this book is the overall idea that the biggest media companies - including Spotify - lack transparency. They're not open to their users, and they're especially not open to media and social science researchers. Spotify even warned the authors of this book that their methods were pushing its Terms of Use rather than offering them ways to study the platform better. Spotify's game is aggregating data, the authors said. Its end game is finance, tech and cultural production. While this may not come as a huge surprise, this reality is an issue when Spotify itself keeps branding itself as only a music provider.
Just as the researchers prompted, we should be asking more critical questions about Spotify. What type of content gets promoted? What are the possibilities for new artists to get found on the platform? Where is my personal data going? How is music streaming killing the music industry? There's a lot to unpack with Spotify, and I'm glad researchers like the authors of this book are taking the risky steps to uncover the realities of media giants.
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