Pelle Snickars

Patrick Vonderau

Maria Eriksson

Rasmus Fleischer

Anna Johansson

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.

Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

Spotify Teardown

Marina Dahlquist

Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media-especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or “spills” in the 20th century to today's post industrial “petromelancholia.”

Petrocinema

Vinzenz Hediger

The history of industrial films - an orphan genre of twentieth-century cinema composed of government-produced and industrially sponsored movies that sought to achieve the goals of their sponsors, rather than the creative artists involved - seems to have left no trace in filmic cultural discourse. At its height the industrial film industry employed thousands, produced several trade journals and festival circuits, engaged with giants of twentieth-century industry like Shell and AT & T, and featured the talents of iconic actors and directors such as Buster Keaton, John Grierson and Alain Resnais. This is the first full-length book, anthology, and annotated bibliography to analyze the industrial film and its remarkable history. Exploring the potential of the industrial film to uncover renewed and unexplored areas of media studies, this remarkable volume brings together renowned scholars such as Rick Prelinger and Thomas Elsaesser in a discussion of the radical potential and new possibilities in considering the history of this unexplored corporate medium.

Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media

Films that Work

Industriële films worden gezien als een apart filmgenre van de twintigste eeuw. Ze werden geproduceerd en gesponsord door de overheid en grote bedrijven en moesten vooral aan de wensen van de sponsors voldoen, en niet zo zeer aan die van de filmmakers. In de hoogtijdagen werkten er duizenden mensen aan deze industriële films. Zo zijn er vakbladen en filmfestivals ontstaan door samenwerking met grote bedrijven als Shell en AT & T. Daarnaast hebben belangrijke regisseurs, zoals Buster Keaton, John Grierson en Alain Resnais, aan deze films meegewerkt. Toch lijkt de industriële film geen spoor te hebben achtergelaten in het filmische culturele discours. Films that Work is het eerste boek waarin de industriële film en zijn opmerkelijke geschiedenis worden onderzocht.

Bo Florin

Yvonne Zimmermann

Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the 'Information Society', motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a 'good life', and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.

Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures

Im Zeitalter des Blockbuster-Kinos kosten Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung fast ebensoviel wie ein Film selbst. Intensität und Volumen der Kampagnen entscheiden über Marktanteile und damit auch über die Chancen kleinerer Filme, überhaupt gesehen zu werden. Verleihfirmen stilisieren ihre Produkte zu Ereignissen mit allumfassender Medienpräsenz. Filmwerbung ist zu einem allgegenwärtigen Medieninhalt geworden, dessen ökonomische und kulturelle Bedeutung kaum überschätzt werden kann. Als erster deutschsprachiger Sammelband vereint Demnächst in ihrem Kino Erstübersetzungen und Originalbeiträge von Autoren aus Europa und den USA. Fachleute aus Medienwissenschaft, Ökonomie und Werbepraxis geben eine aktuelle Einführung in die Problematik der Filmwerbung und erlauben Vertiefungen an einer Vielzahl von Einzelaspekten: Von der DVD-Edition über die Mundpropaganda bis zum Star-Interview, von The Tingler bis Amelie und Dogma 95. Mit Beiträgen von Joe͏̈l Augros, Joan Kristin Bleicher, Joe͏̈lle Farchy, Joseph Garncarz, Mary Beth Haralovich, Fritz Iversen, Janet Staiger, John Waters und anderen.

Grundlagen der Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung

Demnächst in Ihrem Kino

Nico De Klerk

While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.In chapters written by an international ensemble of leading scholars and archivists, the book covers a variety of materials from pre-show advertising films to lantern slides and sponsored 'educations'. With case studies of advertising campaigns and archival collections from a range of different countries, and giving consideration to the problems that advertising materials pose for preservation and presentation, this rich and expansive text testifies to the need for a new approach to this burgeoning subject that looks beyond the mere study of promotional film.

Moving Pictures and Advertising

Films that Sell

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture? Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability—even its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

Patrick Vonderau

Books

Your next favorite book is out there