San Antonio College Library

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. This book contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of 'teardown' from reverse-engineering processes, 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...

Jonathan Taplin tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs began in the 1990s to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms -- Facebook, Amazon and Google -- that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries. Taplin offers a history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies,...