Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life. The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also by considering how online music platforms and streaming services guide music listeners in specific ways. Drawing on case studies from Moscow and Stockholm, and providing analysis of Spotify, VK and YouTube as popular but distinct sites for music, Streaming Music discusses, through a qualitative, cross-cultural, study, questions around music and value, music sharing, modes of engaging with music, and the way that contemporary music listening is increasingly part of mobile, automated and computational processes. Offering a nuanced perspective on these issues, it adds to research about music and digital media, shedding new light on music cultures as they appear today. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars of media, sociology and music with interests in digital technologies.

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.

This succinct title breaks down the complex mechanisms behind audio and video streaming and explains them in terms a middle-school-aged audience can understand. This volume introduces the concept of streaming and then explains how it works and what its uses are. Along the way, important digital terminology and concepts are introduced, such as bandwidth, codecs, plugins, and protocol. A discussion of Internet safety and how to produce and share streaming content wraps up this enlightening text.

In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of this new musical economy, including the roles played by data collection, playlisting, new methods of copyright enforcement, and the calculation of listening metrics. Yet because streaming underscores how uneasily music sits within existing regimes of private property, its rise calls for a broader reconsideration of music’s complex and contradictory relation to capitalism. Drott's analysis is not simply a matter of how music is formatted in line with dominant measures of economic value; equally important is how music eludes such measures, a situation that threatens to reduce music to a cheap, abundant resource. By interrogating the tensions between streaming’s benefits and pitfalls, Drott sheds light on music’s situation within digital capitalism, from growing concentrations of monopoly power and music’s use in corporate surveillance to issues of musical value, labor, and artist pay.

Travel back in time to find out what life was like before streaming music. Historical photographs, helpful infographics, and a “Blast from the Past” special feature provide readers an engaging overview of records, cassette tapes, and other ways people listened to their favorite tunes.

Find out how Spotify changed the way we listen to music in just 50 minutes! Spotify is a music streaming service which was launched in 2008. Its freemium business model, which allows users to choose between listening to music for free or paying a monthly subscription to access an ad-free version of the site, has attracted 140 million active users (of whom 60 million are paying subscribers) to the site, and has generated billions of dollars in revenue, although the site continues operating at a net loss and has drawn heavy criticism from other major players in the music industry. In this concise and accessible guide, you will find out how Spotify revolutionised music lovers’ listening habits, and discover how other key players in the music industry are reacting to this change. In 50 minutes you will: •Learn about Spotify’s history, from its launch in 2008 right up to the present day •Understand the site’s freemium business model •Discover the how the rise of streaming has affected the music industry ABOUT 50MINUTES | BUSINESS STORIES The Business Stories series from the 50Minutes collection provides the tools to quickly understand the innovative companies that have shaped the modern business world. Our publications will give you contextual information, an analysis of business strategies and an introduction to future trends and opportunities in a clear and easily digestible format, making them the ideal starting point for readers looking to understand what makes these companies stand out.

The hidden material histories of music. Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

It is not easy to avoid streaming music, especially when some of the largest companies in the world have worked together to create an environment where it feels like the only reasonable option. As streaming's dominance in the marketplace becomes more solidified, there are importation questions to ask about its impact on culture, the environment, the lives of artists, and the music itself. Join Joe Steinhardt, a professor in Drexel University's Music Industry Program and the owner and founder of Don Giovanni Records, as he explores the mechanics and consequences of music streaming for listeners, artists and industry workers, and how they can be avoided.

In a highly competitive market, digital transformation with internet of things, artificial intelligence, and other innovative technological trends are elements of differentiations and are important milestones in business development and consumer interaction, particularly in services. As a result, there are several new business models anchored in these digital and technological environments and new experiences provided to services consumers and firms that need to be examined. Impact of Digital Transformation on the Development of New Business Models and Consumer Experience provides relevant theoretical and empirical research findings and innovative and multifaceted perspectives on how digital transformation and other innovative technologies can drive new business models and create valued experiences for consumers and firms. Covering topics such as business models, consumer behavior, and gamification, this publication is ideal for industry professionals, managers, business owners, practitioners, researchers, professors, academicians, and students.

For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world -- and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees. In a comprehensive, fast-paced account full of larger-than-life personalities, Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper shows that, after the incredible wealth and excess of the '80s and '90s, Sony, Warner, and the other big players brought about their own downfall through years of denial and bad decisions in the face of dramatic advances in technology. Big Music has been asleep at the wheel ever since Napster revolutionized the way music was distributed in the 1990s. Now, because powerful people like Doug Morris and Tommy Mottola failed to recognize the incredible potential of file-sharing technology, the labels are in danger of becoming completely obsolete. Knopper, who has been writing about the industry for more than ten years, has unparalleled access to those intimately involved in the music world's highs and lows. Based on interviews with more than two hundred music industry sources -- from Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. to renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning -- Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping contemporary history of the industry's wild ride through the past three decades. From the birth of the compact disc, through the explosion of CD sales in the '80s and '90s, the emergence of Napster, and the secret talks that led to iTunes, to the current collapse of the industry as CD sales plummet, Knopper takes us inside the boardrooms, recording studios, private estates, garage computer labs, company jets, corporate infighting, and secret deals of the big names and behind-the-scenes players who made it all happen. With unforgettable portraits of the music world's mighty and formerly mighty; detailed accounts of both brilliant and stupid ideas brought to fruition or left on the cutting-room floor; the dish on backroom schemes, negotiations, and brawls; and several previously unreported stories, Appetite for Self-Destruction is a riveting, informative, and highly entertaining read. It offers a broad perspective on the current state of Big Music, how it got into these dire straits, and where it's going from here -- and a cautionary tale for the digital age.