Spotify Teardown – First Draft Manuscript delivered to MIT Press
Together with my colleagues Patrick Vonderau, Rasmus Fleischer, Maria Eriksson and Anna Johansson, we have put together a first draft manuscript around our Spotify project – just sent off to the publisher MIT Press: Spotify Teardown. Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. It is a substantial manuscript – some 80, 000 words. So what is it all about? Well, first of all the book is co-written by us five scholars, and subsequently edited, commented and revised by way of a ‘Google docs approach,’ in a collaborative and transparent fashion. Furthermore, the book contains two kinds of texts: original research chapters and what we call ‘interventions.’ By interventions, we refer to shorter types of texts that in one way or another interfere with either Spotify and/or established research methods. Our interventions are placed in between the main chapters. They can be read independently, but they are also thematically linked to discussions in previous chapters. Our four chapters each take up a simple question related to Spotify as a digital media company: (1.) Where is Spotify? (2.) When are files becoming music? (3.) How is music attended to? (4.) What is the value of free? Naturally, we hope that the MIT Press will like our book – and we look forward to the finished product (after a number of rounds of revisions). Hopefully, the book will be published early in 2018.