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In this article, we re-trace the history of the Swedish SF archive and reflect on how this collection of historic newsreels has been reappropriated and remixed through-out more recent media history. In particular, we focus on the work of director and film historian Gardar Sahlberg, who made extensive use of the SF archive, first in a series of documentary films, then in a number of historical TV programmes. We are interested in how historic film footage travels and circulates through time, but foremost we explore how algorithms can help identify instances of audio-visual reuse in large datasets. Hence the article discusses algorithmic ways of examining archival film reuse, introducing a method for mapping video reuse with the help of artificial intelligence or more precisely machine learning that uses so-called convo-lutional neural nets. The article presents the Video Reuse Detector (VRD), a tool that uses machine learning to identify visual similarities within a given audiovisual database such as the SF archive.

Software updates are commonly perceived as tools for fixing flaws and improving functionality. In this paper, we problematise this view by showing how software updates may also be used by vendors to create new norms of use that control user behaviour and reduce their agency. We explore the nature and aftermath of a controversial software update that was released by Spotify in June 2019. By analysing almost 3,500 reactions to this update, we show how it removed and modified several features in ways that severely affected users' capability to organise, navigate, and maintain their music libraries, while it pushed modes of listening that delegate song selection to Spotify. Elaborating upon our results, we discuss how updates may be used as political tools that privilege certain forms of behaviour while restricting others. We also portray updates as sites where ongoing struggles and negotiations regarding user agency and digital ownership take place.

This article explores the role of editorial playlists in Spotify's streaming economy. In particular, it approaches Spotify's playlists as container technologies - i.e. technical solutions that assemble, preserve, and transport music objects and thereby uphold logistical operations within the music industry. Such an approach seeks to complement previous research concerning playlists, which has often analyzed their emotional and affective dimensions but paid less attention to how playlists enhance calculative, mathematical, and logistical retail flows within the online music economy. On the one hand, the article considers how playlists - like containers in general - materialize principles of modularization and automation in ways that enhance control and remote oversight. On the other hand, it discusses how the playlist is far from a perfected means of measurement and control, and sometimes acts as an unruly transport device. Ultimately, the article shows how the playlist format occupies an uneasy position between order and disorder within the digital music economy which has not yet been fully accounted for in the context of music-oriented media studies.

This compilation dissertation examines the role of software in online music distribution and critically scrutinizes the increased influence of digital technologies in everyday life. In particular, it explores how software coordinates and arranges things, people, and information surrounding music and thereby exerts a logistical power that makes music calculable and governable online. The dissertation consists of four case-studies that problematize the role of software and algorithms in regulating how digital music moves. Article I highlights the role of algorithms in organizing, evaluating, and creating knowledge about artistry, article II uncovers the material, political, and technical networks that facilitate streamed music, article III scrutinizes editorial playlists and their role in packaging and containing digital sound, and article IV traces how software is designed to identify and regulate how music moves and is monetized in the online domain. These case studies draw attention to issues concerning visibility, access, ownership, control, but also—as this dissertation especially aims to highlight—the elements of surprise, unpredictability, and unsettlement that are inherent to complex software technologies.

The research contributes to three subfields in media and communication studies: music-oriented media studies, materialist media studies, and software studies. It contributes to music-oriented media research by accounting for the role of digital technologies in organizing musical practices and thereby illustrates how algorithms and software must be taken seriously as agents that shape cultural practices surrounding music. Relatedly, the research contributes to materialist- and softwareoriented media research by continuing the tradition of paying close attention to the technical constitution of media technologies and reflecting on the power and politics of software logistics and its unpredictabilities. Methodologically, the research builds on—and advocates—a mixed-methods approach that combines the use of digital methods, media archeological tactics, and a technology-oriented ethnographic approach. In combining these methods, the dissertation illustrates the benefit of experimental and qualitative methods in the study of digital technologies and highlights the need to approach software as both an object of study and a strategic research tool.

Theoretically, the dissertation mainly draws upon materialist and German media theory (e.g., Kittler 1990; 1999; Ernst 2012; 2016), theorizations of logistical operations (e.g., Neilson 2012; Cowen 2014; Durham Peters 2013; Case 2013; Young 2014; 2015), and theories regarding technological accidents, ruptures and unpredictabilities (e.g., Frabetti 2010; Virilio 2007; Parikka and Sampson 2009; Fuller and Goffey 2012). In doing so, the dissertation highlights how the hidden and seemingly ‘grey’ and mundane task of regulating the movement of online music online is, in fact, a deeply cultural and subject to ongoing power struggles. Ultimately, the dissertation illustrates the continued relevance of media research that critically engages with software, adopts digital and experimental methods in the study of digital technologies, acknowledges the logistical power of software, and accounts for the unpredictable events that software technologies sometimes trigger.

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.