Discovering Spotify – A Thematic Introductioni

By Rasmus Fleicher & Pelle Snickars

With a user base now officially reaching more than 100 million, which includes 60
million paying subscribers, the music streaming platform Spotify is today widely
recognized as the solution to problems caused by recent decades of digital disrup-
tion within the music and media industries. Spotify resembles Netflix, YouTube,
and Apple Music as an epitome of streaming’s digital Zeitgeist that is shaping our
future. Industry interviews, trade papers, academic books, and the daily press rei-
terate numerous versions of this “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2013) in
almost as many variations.
This thematic section of Culture Unbound is broadly concerned with the mu-
sic service Spotify, and novel ways to situate and do academic research around
streaming media. Approached through various forms of digital methods, Spotify
serves as the object of study. The four articles presented here—three full length re-
search articles and a shorter reflection—emanates from the cross-disciplinary re-
search project “Streaming Heritage: Following Files in Digital Music Distribution”.
It was initially conceived at the National Library of Sweden (hence the heritage
connection), but the project has predominantly been located at the Umeå Univer-
sity’s digital humanities hub, Humlab, where the research group has continuously
worked with the lab’s programmers. The project involves four researchers and one
PhD student and is funded by the Swedish Research Council between 2014 and
2018.ii
While most previous scholarship on Spotify has primarily focused on its ser-
vice role within the music industry, its alterations to the digital music economy,
or its influence on ending music piracy (Wikström 2013, Wikström & DeFilip-
pi 2016, Allen Anderson 2015, Galuszka 2015, Andersson Schwarz 2013), our

Fleischer, Rasmus & Pelle Snickars: “Discovering Spotify—A Thematic Introduc-

tion”, Culture Unbound, Volume 9, issue 2, 2017: 130–145. Published by Linköping
University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se
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project mainly takes a software studies and digital humanities approach towards
streaming media. The project “Streaming Heritage” broadly engages in reverse en-
gineering Spotify’s algorithms, aggregation procedures, metadata, and valuation
strategies to study platform logics, including underlying norms and structures.
Reverse engineering starts with the final product (in our case the music service
Spotify) and tries to take it apart, backwards, step-by-step. Basically, we draw a
more holistic picture by using Spotify as a lens to explore social, technical, and
economic processes associated with digital media distribution. The key research
idea within our project is to follow files (rather than the people making, using,
or collecting them) on their distributive journey through the streaming ecosys-
tem, taking empirical advantage of inherent data flows at media platforms (such
as Spotify).
Over the last ten years, the extensive field of media and Internet studies have
used several digital methods to develop pioneering ways to analyse and under-
stand the digital, the Internet, as well as digital media production, distribution,
and consumption. Following the catchphrase “the system is the method” (Bruhn
Jensen 2011), digital methodologies are increasingly deployed to perform social
science or humanistic inquiries on, for example, big data and black-boxed media
platforms (such as Spotify) (Ruppert, Law & Savage 2013). As a research practice,
digital methods “strive to follow the evolving methods of the medium” (Rogers
2013:1). The issue of data of, about, and around the Internet, as Klaus Bruhn Jen-
sen has eloquently stated, “highlights the common distinction between research
evidence that is either ‘found’ or ‘made’”. If one disregards various complexities,
basically all evidence needed for Internet or digital studies is already at hand.
When interacting, searching, and listening to music at Spotify, for example, user
data are constantly being produced. Such data are “documented in and of the sys-
tem” and “with a little help from network administrators and service providers” it
can be used as the empirical base for research (Bruhn Jensen 2011:52).
For researchers seeking to take empirical advantage of data flows at contem-
porary media platforms, it quickly becomes apparent “that such platforms do not
present us with raw data, but rather with specially formatted information” (Marres
& Gerlitz 2015). Data, in short, are often biased. Twitter, for example, determines
what data are available and how the data can be accessed, and researchers often
have a hard time knowing what relevant data might be missing. Hence, the major
academic problem confronting media scholars working with digital methods is
the lack of access to data. In our project, the main difficulty in doing research on
and around Spotify is the reluctance of the company to share data.
Consequently, user data must be acquired and compiled through other means
such as by deploying bots as research informants or by recording and aggrega-
ting self-produced music and sounds. Building on the tradition of breaching ex-

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periments in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), where reactions are caused by

disturbing or even violating commonly accepted rules or norms, our project has
tried via repeated and modified so-called “interventions” to break into the hidden
infrastructures of digital music distribution. On the one hand, we have been inte-
rested in broadly studying different data patterns and media processes at Spotify.
On the other hand, we have also been keen on producing and obtaining research
data, for example, by using bots as virtual listeners, by documenting (and tracing)
Spotify’s history through constantly changing interfaces, or by tracking and archi-
ving advertisement flows. Using debugging software such as Fiddler or Ghostery,
we have also tracked traffic between a computer and the Internet.
Although this thematic section of Culture Unbound is concerned with Spotify,
basically any other streaming media services could be studied in similar ways. The
various digital methods we present, use, and critically discuss can be used to ana-
lyse a range of different online services or platforms that today serve as key delive-
ry mechanisms for works of culture, including YouTube, Netflix as well as various
platforms for e-books or academic articles. Although our analysis is specific, the
methods we propose are of more general relevance and concern. For example,
using bots as research informants can be deployed for many different types of
digital scholarship. Due to the transformation of media into data, digital methods
can easily be used in research (albeit with some coding skills). When media at
online services (such as Spotify) are coded and redefined as a purely data-driven
communication form—with, on the one hand, content (e.g., media files and me-
tadata) being aggregated through external intermediaries, and, on the other hand,
user-generated data being extracted from listening habits—the singularity of the
media experience is transformed and blended into what Jeremy Wade Morris has
termed “a multimediated computing experience” (Wade Morris 2015: 191).
For a regular user, today’s multimediated and exceedingly computational ex-
perience of online media takes on different and sometimes personalised forms. To
understand the logic and rationale of contemporary media services and platforms,
one should not shy away from but rather ask what exactly happens when data are
turned into media and vice versa. What occurs and takes place beneath the black
shiny surface of, say, the Spotify desktop client, with its green and greyish interfa-
ce details and whited fonts and textures? It goes without saying, that research on
the cultural implications of software—whether in the form of software studies,
digital humanities, platform studies, or media archaeology—has repeatedly stres-
sed the need for in-depth investigations on how computing technologies work
combined with (more or less) meticulous descriptions of technical specificities
(Kirschenbaum 2008, Chun 2011, Sterne, 2012, Ernst 2013).

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Localising Spotify
Departing from the interventionist and experimental approaches we have used in
our research project, which both metaphorically and practically try to track and
follow the transformation of audio files into streamed experiences in the simple
way a postman would follow the route of a parcel from packaging to delivery, the
notion of localisation has become salient. Following files is a technical impossi-
bility in a streaming media context, yet approaching, encircling, and circumscri-
bing Spotify, both as a company and a service, has also proven to be hard. In our
research project, we have repeatedly asked insidiously simple questions: Where is
Spotify? When is Spotify used? What is Spotify? It might seem naive, but during
the research process it has become increasingly difficult for us to understand and
grasp our object of study.
Asking Google the search question “What is a Spotify?” returns a snippet
from Wikipedia: “Spotify is a music, podcast, and video streaming service, offici-
ally launched on 7 October 2008. It is developed by start-up Spotify AB in Stock-
holm, Sweden” (Wikipedia 2017). But such an answer hides more than it shows
and can easily be problematized. Is Spotify, for example, a content platform, a dist-
ribution service, or a media company? Furthermore, music naturally lies at the
heart of Spotify (even if podcasts and videos seem increasingly important), but
what kind of content is accepted—i.e., how is music defined? And what about the
Swedishness of Spotify? Where is the company located? Headquarters are still to
be found in central Stockholm on Birger Jarlsgatan 61, but the service is now avai-
lable in some 60 countries, not to mention the digital variety of desktop and mo-
bile versions (which all differ slightly). In addition, how does one situate Spotify
commercially and financially (i.e., how much money is Spotify making (or losing)
and how can one measure its economic impact?
As is apparent from the four issues above—and one could easily have included
yet another—localising Spotify is easier said than done. Starting, however, by de-
termining whether Spotify is a tech or a media company, it was obvious that Spoti-
fy for several years foremost offered a technological solution for record companies
struggling with piracy. In a private conversation in 2012, one of the authors of
this introduction (Snickars) asked Sophia Bendz (at the time Head of Marketing
at Spotify) what kind of company Spotify actually was. Without hesitating, Bendz
stated that Spotify was a tech company, only distributing content produced by
others. The tech identity, however, was somewhat dubious even in 2012 and has
become increasingly harder to sustain. Advertisement serves an illustrative case
in point. In endless discussions with record labels (around rights management),
Spotify took the stance that the continuous offering of a zero-price version with
recurrent advertisement (Spotify Free) would in the long run be the best solution,
as this strategy would serve as an incentive to scale businesses and attract glo-

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bal listeners. Spotify’s classification as strictly a tech company misses the fact that a
core part of its business has been to provide content to audiences and selling those
audiences to advertisers. Other music streaming services used a different strategy
and Spotify has consequently struggled, and increasingly become more of a media
company, all in order to keep to its business model with two versions of the product:
the Free version (with embedded advertising) and the Premium version (without
advertising).
Arguably, the music industry still sees Spotify as the top streaming service
around, yet Spotify “has done little to address the lack of new music from a large
collection of major artists when their albums are released” (Singleton 2016). That
is, in a digital environment where streaming music becomes default, a focus on
tech and distribution will only result in missed business opportunities. Indeed,
Spotify has not really entered into content production (e.g., like Netflix), although
some self-made videos are provided such as interviews with artists as well as other
content (e.g., pop-ups that explain lyrics). Hence, stating that Spotify is only a tech
company (in the form of a streaming service) fails to see other defining characte-
ristics of the enterprise.
Secondly, “Music for everyone” is the company catch phrase, displayed, for ex-
ample, when entering spotify.com. To localise Spotify, one might ask what kind of
music does the service offer? In fact, one fundamental question we have struggled
with in our research project is determining what sounds are perceived as music
according to Spotify. It should be stressed that uploading music onto the service is
outsourced to several so-called aggregation services. In short, these (and not Spo-
tify) regulate content appearing on different music streaming platforms. In one
of our interventions, we experimented with uploading self-produced music via
different aggregators. These explorations with artificial sounds and music resulted
in different responses. The same music (or sounds) passed some aggregators, but
others did not define these “sounds” as music content at all. In short, rejection
criteria of music aggregators turned out to be arbitrary. Hence, when principles
as to what is considered music vary at the aggregation level, and consequently on
streaming platforms such as Spotify, usually depending on whether users pay an
aggregation fee or not, the line between music and non-music, artist and machine,
becomes increasingly blurred.
A third way to use the notion of localisation to pinpoint Spotify is to look closer
at geography and the hype around the “Swedishness” of Spotify. On the one hand,
the company is still often associated with Sweden: “Swedish music-streaming ser-
vice provider Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire German rival SoundCloud”
(The Guardian, 2016). Yet, on the other hand, geographical localisation strategies
also make it apparent that Spotify tries hard to transform itself into a global media
company: “Spotify is tailoring its service for local tastes, from topical playlists to

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tiered pricing, as it prepares to expand its music streaming in Asia” (Bloomberg

2016). Spotify, in fact, increasingly acts as a global media company, and as a result,
Patrick Vonderau (one of the researchers in our project) has recently claimed that
“Spotify is neither particularly Swedish nor about music”. While invocations of the
company’s Swedishness have been needed to sustain venture capital, and a “vision
of ‘European unicorns’ . . . to position Spotify at the sexy, cool end of digital inno-
vation”, Vonderau argues that in financial terms Spotify now acts more “as a digital
broker whose history of equity rounds, market and debt capitalization, and board
of directors firmly ties brokerage strategies to U.S.-based financial interests” (Von-
derau 2017). Spotify, in short, operates increasingly like a traditional American
media company.
A fourth way to try to frame and localise Spotify is to follow the money and
look at the company’s evasive finances. Some figures estimate that the company
makes more than two billion dollars a year from subscription fees and advertising,
yet approximately 80 percent of that income is (all likely) paid to record labels and
artists. In general, the financial situation and status of Spotify remains concealed,
yet the same basically goes for the commodity that is being sold. As Rasmus Flei-
scher argues in his article in this thematic section, a crucial issue when dealing
with the political economy of digital media is understanding what kind of com-
modity is being sold and to whom.
Lately, it has even been claimed that Spotify is “causing a major problem for
economists” (Edwards 2016). Within mainstream economics, it is now commonly
acknowledged that GDP is just an empirical construct that is becoming ever more
misleading (Coyle 2014, Economist 2016). One main problem is how to measure
inflation: to establish a price index, it is necessary to quantify differences in quality
between last year’s products and this year’s products. It is difficult to compare the
price of music sold as discrete units and music bundled as a monthly subscription
(Spotify Premium) or offered with advertisements (Spotify Free). Is it meaning-
ful to calculate a hypothetical “price per track listened to” in any of these cases?
And how should we measure, in monetary terms, the value of music recommen-
dations? Because of such quandaries, economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and An-
drew McAfee have pointed to Spotify as an example of how national accounts
fail to capture the “consumer surplus” resulting from rapid technological progress
(Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2014: 174–189). Even a more traditional calculation of
national accounts, which only includes those transactions where money is chang-
ing hands, poses delicate problems when locating Spotify. Thus, recent governme-
nt inquiries from Sweden and the U.K. have singled out Spotify as the epitome of
problems with measuring an economy increasingly built on digital services (Fel-
länder 2015; Bean 2016). It seems that Spotify has not only disrupted the music
and media industries but also has disrupted the ways in which the economic sta-

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tistics surrounding user data need to be measured and interpreted.

Historicising Spotify
The story of Spotify is commonly told as an extraordinary success story: over 100
million users and over $8 billion valuation and growing. However, Spotify has
yet to show a profit. So far, its losses have tended to grow faster than its turnover,
so the survival of the service depends on ever larger injections of venture capital.
This situation, typical for today’s technology start-ups, tends to limit the oppor-
tunities for independent research. To attract investment and to secure deals with
partner companies, it is necessary for Spotify to maintain a certain level of buzz
in the news media, confirming the image of a company always expanding, always
innovating, and always headed on a straight path towards a future monopoly po-
sition. No information will be let out if it does not play a predefined role in this
public relations strategy.
One might argue that the buzz and hype, including problems in localising the
company, makes it difficult for researchers to approach Spotify, at least compared
to more established companies that have already gone public. Throughout most of
Spotify’s lifetime, there have been speculations about an imminent stock market
launch, an IPO (Initial Public Offering), or a possible acquisition in which Spotify
would be bought up by Google, Apple, or Facebook. Certain commentators have
also questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. These discussions
and speculations have not lead anywhere and often remain obscure as vital details
are kept secret via nondisclosure agreements between Spotify and the music indu-
stry. Another impossible (but lively) discussion has been concerned with whether
Spotify is good for artists, as if artists exist as a homogenous group to which Spo-
tify can be either good or bad.
From our research perspective, it is more relevant to ask how Spotify takes
part in a redefinition of what it means to be a successful artist or a record company
by changing the ways in which music is presented, commodified, and valuated. In
other words, the producer of musical recordings cannot be thought of as existing
independently of the distributor. As researchers, we must simply acknowledge
that Spotify is a moving object and that the results from our digital experiments
and interventions must be situated within a historical context (even though the
company is not much older than ten years). One important source material for
the historiography of Spotify, which has been essential for our research, is a major
archive of news reports, including trade journals focusing on tech (e.g., Wired and
Techcrunch), music (e.g., Billboard and Music Week) and advertising (e.g., Adver-
tising Age and Marketing Week), all sources we have constantly been collecting.
Going through this archive, one is confronted by an immense level of buzz,

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speculations, rumours, and empty promises. Localising and historicising Spotify

is in many ways a task of how one approaches this constant murmur. One possi-
bility is to regard this buzz simply as a kind of noise that ought to be filtered out,
leaving a smaller selection of verified stories, useful for producing a historiograp-
hy over what Spotify has really done. We propose the opposite approach, however:
Just as we follow the files using digital methods, we follow the buzz using archives
(i.e., our historiography). This means working through a tremendous source ma-
terial looking not only for what happened, but also after what Richard Barbrook
has described as “the beta version of a science fiction dream: the imaginary futu-
re” (2007). The history of Spotify is, in fact, full of false predictions and visions.
Taking these shortcomings into account provides an important corrective to the
conventional narrative about the gradual realisation of a grandiose entrepreneu-
rial vision.
It may surely be true that Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, has a deep passion for mu-
sic and that he enjoys playing the guitar, but when he and Martin Lorentzon foun-
ded Spotify in 2006, it was certainly not an attempt to disrupt the music industry
to save it from piracy, as the official story now goes (Bertoni 2012) The original
idea behind Spotify was purely technological: to create a platform for media dist-
ribution based on a peer-to-peer network. The first news reports in Sweden, in
fact, presented Spotify as a company building a new infrastructure for film dist-
ribution. However, because video demanded too much bandwidth, Spotify’s first
set up and trials used music files as distribution content (Åkesson 2007, Johansson
2015). To be more precise, the beta version of Spotify was loaded with pirated
music files, downloaded by its employees through file-sharing services like The Pi-
rate Bay (Andersson Schwarz 2013: 149). Music streaming proved attractive, and
soon enough Ek and Lorentzon had conceived a business model for music, clearly
inspired by the popularity of illicit file-sharing in Sweden. Spotify was to make
music free but legal, available to consumers at no cost, while advertising provided
all revenues.
Spotify’s launch, thus, coincided perfectly with the broader hype around the
idea that “$0.00 Is the Future of Business” (Anderson 2008, Fleischer 2017), but
also with the onset of a global financial crisis, which was soon to decimate the ad-
vertising market, making it hard to sustain ad-funded “free” services. The business
of selling subscriptions for media services, however, tended to do remarkably well
in the recession (Economist 2009). Spotify hence gradually changed its mind, now
declaring that both advertising and subscriptions were to be equally important
sides of their business model, while also dabbling with ideas of making money
on sales of merchandise and concert tickets. In retrospect, it is striking how long
the founders of Spotify resisted the idea of building a business fully dependent on
subscription revenues.

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Historiography cannot do without an element of periodisation. With respect

to Spotify’s financial uncertainty and its dependence on venture capital, the com-
pany history can thus be understood over a timeline of investments. These have
come in a series of funding rounds, from the first round (Series A) of about $20
million to the most recent round of $1 billion in convertible debt. Each time, the
value of existing stocks has been diluted, the balance of ownership displaced in a
new direction. The identity of the investors is usually public information, aggrega-
ted on websites like Crunchbase (2016), but the conditions detailed in each deal is
always a secret. However, if one follows the buzz and maps it over the investment
timeline, some of it becomes evident. Investments have, for example, been used
mostly for international expansion (Series D, Series F) or for developing the strea-
ming service in a specific direction (Series E).
Daniel Ek has been dubbed “the most important man in music” by Forbes
(Bertoni 2012) and one of the ten most powerful people in the music industry
(Billboard 2016), yet he is not in control of Spotify. The company’s founders most
certainly lost their majority share by 2009. In addition, Spotify’s existence rema-
ins dependent on the willingness of the Big Three record labels (Universal Music
Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group) to renew their li-
censing deals. Hence there are several reasons why Spotify is not like Facebook: it
is not profitable, it is not publicly traded, and it cannot dictate the terms in dealing
with content providers. It would be silly to deny that Spotify is not dominant and
mighty, but the power of Spotify is not easily located. Rather than being a single
forceful actor trying to shape the future of music, Spotify indeed exists at the in-
tersection of competing industries (tech, content, advertising, and finance).
One way to historicise Spotify in a more concrete manner is to look at altered
strategies for music discovery. In the earlier period before its U.S. launch, Spotify’s
interface was centred around the search box (Fleischer 2015). Not much effort was
put into assisting users who did not immediately know what music they wanted
to hear. In other words, Spotify’s ideal user was an individual with strong musical
preferences (as part of his or her identity). When asked about the lack of social
features in 2009, a Spotify director simply answered: “We’re coming at it from the
on-demand side” (Music Week 2009). This was also Spotify’s real strength, accor-
ding to influential magazines like Billboard and Wired; the service was considered
fast, clean, and easy to use, and importantly so because it did not push music re-
commendations to its users (Bruno 2009, Peoples 2010, Pollack 2011).
This partly began to change in 2010–11, when Spotify established a strate-
gic partnership with Facebook, following a Series C investment by Sean Parker
(co-founder of Facebook and, before that, of Napster) who also joined Spotify’s
board of directors. The interface was gradually redesigned, moving away from the
individualism of the search box and towards more social approaches of friction-

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less sharing: all music listening would be automatically shared with friends. This
was met, however, by an outcry from many users, forcing Spotify to introduce new
options for protecting the privacy of musical preferences (Spotify 2011a, Spotify
2011b, Financial Times 2011). In short, the social turn provided a new direction for
Spotify’s developers, moving away from the poverty of the empty search box and
towards a third way, different from both algorithmic and expert-curated music re-
commendations (Fleischer 2017). By integrating with Facebook, Spotify hoped to
create the ultimate discovery engine. Spotify’s approach was to recommend music
based on what the user’s friends had put in their playlists. Friends, however, can
have bad taste. Ultimately, social discovery turned out to be a failure in the light
of Spotify’s experience on the U.S. market. Spotify had emphasised the freedom to
choose, but many Americans seemed to prefer the freedom from choice. By the
end of 2012, Daniel Ek admitted that “Spotify is great when you know what music
you want to listen to, but not so great when you don’t” (Bercovici 2012).
Spotify’s social turn was followed, just a couple of years later, by a curatorial
turn. The development of this type of new music discovery approach (throughout
2013) was financed by a $100 million investment round (series E) led by Goldman
Sachs. Spotify was indeed not a vanguard in this movement. During 2012, indu-
stry observers began establishing as a fact that people love to simply lean back and
listen. The future of streaming music was now more commonly sought in radio-li-
ke lean-back services such as Pandora, while the lean-forward approach of Spotify
was seen as its Achilles’ heel (Peoples 2012, Warren 2012). Trying to remedy this,
Spotify first acquired Tunigo, a company specialised in building expert-curated
music playlists. At the same time, Spotify discarded its old, individualist slogan:
“Whatever you want, whenever you want it” (Spotify 2011c). New slogans were
put in use: “Music for every moment” (Spotify 2013a) and “Soundtrack your life”
(Spotify 2013b). In every country where Spotify was active, the local office began
to recruit playlist curators with knowledge of local culture, but not specialised
in any specific genres. The standard job description used was typical of Spotify’s
new approach: playlist curators should identify “songs to fit different situations”
and create “playlist listening experiences for a multitude of moods, moments, and
genres” (Spotify 2014). Here, it seems that Spotify had opted for a more human
approach of expert curation, but Spotify was simultaneously working on algorith-
mic recommendation systems in close cooperation with the music intelligence
company The Echo Nest, which it acquired in 2014. Neither a purely human nor
a purely algorithmic curation system would be conceivable, but a combination of
the two could work. In any case, it is finally interesting to note how this dichotomy
was reinforced in 2015 by Apple when it presented its new streaming music servi-
ce. Apple Music was then framed as the more warm and human alternative to the
allegedly cold and all-too-algorithmic Spotify (Apple 2015, Dredge 2015).

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About the Articles

As is evident from the discussions above, analysing Spotify is not an easy task. If
localising Spotify is hard, historicizing the company’s whereabouts doesn’t result
in a particularly straight trajectory either. On the contrary, users, competitors, and
investors have all influenced the different directions that Spotify has taken and
will all likely continue to do so. Hence, if music discovery today is important for
Spotify to both satisfy and create a desire to consume and listen to more music,
discovering Spotify is another matter. This thematic section of Culture Unbound,
however, tries to locate the streaming service from several different perspectives.
It brings together ongoing and differentiated research within the project “Strea-
ming Heritage: Following Files in Digital Music Distribution”. The four articles
presented are, in short, all concerned with uncovering and finding out more about
Spotify via different research strategies and methods. Three of the articles use di-
gital methods in their approach, trying to get closer to Spotify through inventive
experiments. Two of the longer articles (Eriksson & Johansson and Snickars) also
explicitly use bots as research informants. A bot is a small software application
that runs automated tasks (or scripts), and within interventions at Humlab we
have repeatedly used massive set-ups of bots, sometimes working with up to 500
virtual listeners.
In the first article in the thematic section, “If the song has no price, is it still
a commodity?”, Rasmus Fleischer reviews some of the recent literature on how
music is marketed. Over the last century, music has been subject to different re-
gimes of commodification, sold as a published score, as a live performance, or as
recorded sound. Streaming services like Spotify, however, represent a different
commodification regime, Fleischer argues. Therefore, it is necessary to identify
and define the commodity Spotify sells. Fleischer criticises prevalent concep-
tions of the digital music commodity that often assume that each song (whether
downloaded or streamed) is a commodity, which is indeed correct in the case of
downloading services like the iTunes Store. But the user of Spotify will (current-
ly) never see a price tag on a song. In fact, Spotify is not selling discrete pieces of
recorded sound and is not offering consumers millions of commodities; Spotify
offer only one commodity: the subscription. This product is a bundle that inclu-
des not only access to all songs in the catalogue, but also the maintenance of a
personalised profile connected to a variety of playlists tailored for pre-defined
activities. Music is still commodified by Spotify, Fleischer argues, but as a com-
modity, music can mean different things. Spotify is, for example, buying music
through various aggregation services in the form av copyright licenses, bund-
ling it, adding new features, and then selling music as a personalised experience.
When analysing commodification, it is always necessary to ask what kind of
object is the commodity.

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In their article, “Tracking Gendered Streams”, Maria Eriksson and Anna Jo-
hansson investigate whether music recommendations at Spotify are gendered. As
is well known, one of the most prominent features on contemporary music ser-
vices is the provision of personalised music recommendations that come about
through the profiling of users and audiences. Based on a range of bot experiments,
their article explores patterns in music recommendations provided by Spotify in
its Discover feature. The article specifically focuses on issues around gender and
explores whether the Spotify client and its music recommendation algorithms are
performative of gendered user identities and taste constellations. Exploring the
tension between gendered publics and Spotify’s promise to deliver personalised
music recommendations to everyone, Eriksson and Johansson’s research ties into
broader questions about the workings and effects of algorithmic knowledge pro-
duction. They argue that issues around gender are important in this context, since
Spotify’s music recommendations can be considered as one of the venues where
gendered norms and ideals are reproduced and manifested. Eriksson and Johans-
son’s results for example reveal that male artists were highly overrepresented in
Spotify’s music recommendations; an issue which they argue prompts users to re-
produce hegemonic masculine norms within the music industries. Although the
results should be approached as highly historically and contextually contingent,
Eriksson and Johansson argue that they do give some evidence of the ways in
which gender becomes tied to issues of taste and identity formation in algorithmic
knowledge-making processes.
In his article, “More of the Same – On Spotify Radio”, Pelle Snickars takes a
similar approach as Eriksson and Johansson, working extensively with bots as re-
search informants. Snickars main interest is the so-called radio function at strea-
ming services, and Spotify Radio in particular. It is a service that “lets you sit back
and listen to music you love. The more you personalise the stations to match your
tastes the better they get”, at least according to the company slogan. Basically, the
radio functionality allows users (via various unknown algorithms) to find new
music within Spotify’s vast back-catalogue, offering a potential infinite avenue of
discovery. Nevertheless, the radio service has also been disliked and blamed for
playing the same artists over and over. Together with the Humlab programmers,
Snickars set up an experiment to explore the possible limitations and restrains
found within “infinite archives” of music streaming services. The hypothesis was
that the radio function of Spotify does not consist of an infinite series of songs
although it may appear so to the listener; it is actually a finite loop. Spotify Radio
claims to be personalised and never-ending, yet music seems to be delivered in
limited loop patterns. What would such loop patterns look like? The interven-
tion used 160 bot listeners programmed to listen to different Swedish music from
the 1970s. Snickars is not primarily interested in personalised recommendations,

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Journal of Current Cultural Research

but rather how Spotify Radio functions generically. The first (and major) round
of bots started Spotify Radio based on the highly popular Abba song “Dancing
Queen” (with some 65 million streams). The second (and minor) round of bots
used the less well-known Swedish progressive rock band Råg i Ryggen’s “Queen
of Darkness” (with some 10,000 streams). Snickars article describes different rese-
arch strategies when dealing with proprietary data as well as the background and
the establishment of the radio functionality at streaming services like Spotify. Es-
sentially, his article empirically recounts, discusses, and analyses the radio looping
interventions set up at Humlab.
Finally, in their co-written article, “Studying Ad Targeting with Digital
Methods: The Case of Spotify”, Patrick Vonderau and Roger Mähler provide a
brief description of digital methods used in studying digital advertising techno-
logies. To study ad targeting, researchers have an inventory of tested methods at
their disposal but a problem of access to verifiable data persists. In order to under-
stand which types of key stakeholders are involved in ad targeting processes, the
authors experimented with digital tools to complement data collection. In doing
so, they followed the well-established idea of taking up methods that are already
embedded in digital infrastructures and practices.
This thematic section of Culture Unbound goes under the hood of Spotify and
looks critically at its tech stack. It is important to remember that Spotify’s data
infrastructure resembles other services. The analyses put forth in the different
articles (sometimes) approximates media specific readings of the computational
base; that is, the mathematical structures underlying various interfaces and surfa-
ces resonate with media scholarly interests in technically rigorous ways of under-
standing the operations of material technologies. Then again, it is also important
to stress that the Spotify infrastructure is hardly a uniform platform. Rather it is
downright traversed by unseen data flows, file transfers, and information retrieval
in all kinds of directions, be they metadata traffic identifying music, aggregation
of audio content, playout of streaming audio formats (in different quality ratings),
programmatic advertising (modelled on finance’s stock exchanges), or interac-
tions with other services (notably social media platforms). This thematic section
tries to uncover and make visible some of these streams.

Rasmus Fleischer is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Department of

Economic History, Stockholm University. His research interests are located in the
intersections between culture and economy, as well as technology and poli-
tics. Most of all, he has explored 20th century media history, transformations
of copyright and the commodification of music. E-mail: rasmus.fleischer@
ekohist.su.se

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 Culture Unbound
Journal of Current Cultural Research

Pelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies, specialising in

digital humanities at Umeå university and is affiliated with the Humlab research
centre. His research focuses on the relationship between old and new media, me-
dia economy, digitisation of cultural heritage, media history as well as the impor-
tance of new technical infrastructures for the humanities. E-mail: pelle.snickars@
umu.se

Notes
i
Some of the digital methods used in this thematic section are non-compliant with
Spotify’s Terms of Service (ToS). The data collection has ended and did not involve
any user data. With the public and academic interest in mind, we appreciate Spotify’s
forbearance with any trespassings of ToS that our data collection involved.
ii The research project, “Streaming Heritage. Following Files in Digital Music Distribu-
tion” involves system developers Roger Mähler and Johan von Boer (at Humlab, Umeå
University), as well as researchers Pelle Snickars, Maria Eriksson, Anna Johansson (at
Umeå University), Rasmus Fleischer (at Stockholm and Umeå University), and Pa-
trick Vonderau (at Stockholm University). For more information: http://streaming-
heritage.se/.

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