| 1. |
- Eriksson, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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Spotify teardown : inside the black box of streaming music
- 2019
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
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| 2. |
- Fleischer, Julia, et al.
(författare)
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The State as a Marketizer vs. the Marketization of the State: Two Organizational Models of Public Sector Corporatization
- 2024
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Ingår i: Public Organization Review. - : SPRINGERNATURE. - 1566-7170 .- 1573-7098.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Governments engage in corporatization by creating corporate entities or reorganizing existing ones. These corporatization activities reflect an interplay between political agency and environmental pressures, including (changing) notions of state-market relations. This paper discusses two ideal-typed organizational models of corporatization: the state as a marketizer and the marketization of the state. Whereas the first emphasizes the role of political design and agency in corporatization, the second emphasizes the role of (actors in) the environment for corporatization. Both models are assessed across five corporatization episodes in Norway and Sweden, where we also demonstrate the interplay between political agency and environmental pressure.
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| 3. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Discovering Spotify – A Thematic Introduction
- 2017
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Ingår i: Culture Unbound. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2000-1525. ; 9:2, s. 130-145
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 4. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-
(författare)
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If the Song has No Price, is it Still a Commodity? : Rethinking the Commodification of Digital Music
- 2017
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Ingår i: Culture Unbound. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2000-1525. ; 9:2, s. 146-162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In music streaming services like Spotify, discrete pieces of music no longer has a price, as has traditionally been the case in music retailing, both analog and digital. This article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this shift towards subscriptions, starting from a critical review of recent literature dealing with the commodification of music. The findings have a relevance that is not limited to music or digital media, but also apply more broadly on the study of commodification. At the theoretical level, the article compares two ways of defining the commodity, one structural (Marx), one situational (Appadurai, Kopytoff), arguing for the necessity of a theory that can distinguish commodities from all that which is not (yet) commodified. This is demonstrated by taking Spotify as a case, arguing that it does not sell millions of different commodities to its users, but only one: the subscription itself. This has broad economic and cultural implications, of which four are highlighted:(1) The user of Spotify has no economic incentive to limit music listening, because the price of a subscription is the same regardless of the quantity of music consumed.(2) For the same reason, Spotify as a company cannot raise its revenues by making existing customers consume more of the product, but only by raising the number of subscribers, or by raising the price of a subscription.(3) Within platforms like Spotify, it is not possible to use differential pricing of musical recordings, as has traditionally been the case in music retail. Accordingly, record companies or independent artists hence can no longer compete for listeners by offering their music at a discount.(4) Within the circuit of capital. Spotify may actually be better understood as a commodity producer than as a distributor, implying a less symbiotic relationship to the recorded music industry.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-
(författare)
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Protecting the musicians and/or the record industry? On the history of ‘neighbouring rights’ and the role of Fascist Italy
- 2015
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Ingår i: Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property. - : Edward Elgar Publishing. - 2045-9807 .- 2045-9815. ; 5:3, s. 327-343
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The early history of the so-called ‘neighbouring rights’, as part of the history of copyright, has so far been given very little attention by scholars. This article sheds light on a European contest over the rights in sound recordings during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This forms an important part of the background to the Rome Convention of 1961. The article first looks separately at how musicians’ unions and the record industry were raising different demands for protective legislation, motivated by the use of new electronic media. At the beginning, no one imagined that these protections would be bundled together as ‘neighbouring rights’. While the International Labour Organization (ILO) put great efforts into creating a convention protecting only the performers, another actor turned out to be more influential in the long run, proposing a hierarchical bundling of rights in which only record companies were entitled to compensation for the use of recordings. This actor was the Fascist government of Italy. The article argues that there are some continuities from the legal philosophy of Italian Fascism to the system of ‘neighbouring rights’ established in the Rome Convention.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, et al.
(författare)
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The Political Significance of Spotify in Sweden – Analysing the #backaspotify Campaign using Twitter Data
- 2018
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Ingår i: Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2000-1525. ; 10:2, s. 1-21
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses the political significance of the streaming music company Spotify in Sweden, taking as a case a coordinated campaign in late spring 2016, known by the hashtag #backaspotify (translated as “support Spotify!”), which was mainly played out on the social media platform Twitter. The campaign is analysed using a set of data retrieved from Twitter, examining both the content and the interactions in 1,791 messages. Results show that the main political issue concerned the lack of access to rented apartments in central Stockholm, and that the main actors in the campaign were predominantly associated with public affairs consultants and the youth wings of political parties belonging to the centre-right. The campaign, however, was very short-lived and had diminished significantly already after two days. We conclude that Spotify transcends its role as a streaming music company, and additionally can be used as a point of reference in political campaigns to promote issues that are of wider scope than the music industry alone.
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| 9. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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The Political Significance of Spotify in Sweden – Analysing the #backaspotify Campaign using Twitter Data
- 2018
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Ingår i: Culture Unbound. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2000-1525. ; 18:2, s. 301-321
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses the political significance of the streaming music company Spotify in Sweden, taking as a case a coordinated campaign in late spring 2016, known by the hashtag #backaspotify (translated as “support Spotify!”), which was mainly played out on the social media platform Twitter. The campaign is analysed using a set of data retrieved from Twitter, examining both the content and the interactions in 1,791 messages. Results show that the main political issue concerned the lack of access to rented apartments in central Stockholm, and that the main actors in the campaign were predominantly associated with public affairs consultants and the youth wings of political parties belonging to the centre-right. The campaign, however, was very short-lived and had diminished significantly already after two days. We conclude that Spotify transcends its role as a streaming music company, and additionally can be used as a point of reference in political campaigns to promote issues that are of wider scope than the music industry alone.
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| 10. |
- Fleischer, Rasmus, 1978-
(författare)
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Towards a Postdigital Sensibility : How to get Moved by too Much Music
- 2015
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Ingår i: Culture Unbound. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2000-1525. ; 7, s. 255-269
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The article explores the affective consequences of the new mode of instant access to enormous levels of musical recordings in digital format. It is suggested that this "musical superabundance" might weaken the individuals ability to be affected by music in everyday life, while at the same time leading to a renewed interest in collective experience, in ways which are not limited to established notions of musical "liveness". According to a theory of affect influenced by Spinoza, what is at stake is the capacity of the body to be affected by music. The article proposes that a renegotiated relationship between collective and individual modes of experiencing music can be conceptualized with help of Spinozas distinction between two kinds of affections: actions and passions. After scrutinizing the interface of hardware like Apples Ipod and online services like Spotify, the article proceeds by discussing three musical practices which can all be understood as responses to the superabundance of musical recordings: (1) the ascetic practice of "No Music Day"; (2) the revival of cassette culture; (3) the "bass materialism" associated with the music known as dubstep. While none of these approaches provide any solution to the problem of abundance, they can still be understood as attempts to cultivate a "postdigital sensibility". The article tries to conceptualize the postdigital in a way that transcends the narrower notion of "post-digital aesthetics" that has recently been gaining popularity. Finally, it is argued that such a sensibility has a political significance in its potential to subvert the contemporary processes of commodification.
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