Spotify: A Controversial Topic Summary.

This week’s blog post sparked a huge amount of discussion with engagement across #UOSM2033 and #MANG2049.

I began the week by looking at UOSM2033 blog posts by Catherine and Pippa both on very different areas of open access to those I had discussed. Pippa introduced me to Wix:

This was a great learning curve, beginning to see new platforms. The discussions I had with both Pippa and Catherine centred on the de-professionalization of professions due to open access and the way that open access has directly affected our academic studies.

However, the majority of the development in knowledge gained this week was through extensive debates on Spotify featured on my blog post.

Check out my storify of twitter conversations MANG2049 and UOSM2033 students had this week on Spotify: 

I had numerous contributions to the debate from Charmaine, Yvonne, Zoe, Sara, Calum and Dom. The debates we had included discussing whether Spotify was an asset to the music industry or not.  And in Zoe’s summary post she discusses this even further; through a chart. Another theme of the discussions was the extra benefits that Spotify provides: allowing individuals access to new music, new artists and a larger catalogue that ever before. Frequently the topic of reduced piracy was introduced into the discussions.

Calum and Dom particularly brought to light the idea of the very small amount of money Spotify pays the artists per play. This led into discussions on whether Spotify is sustainable and the other platforms that artists make revenue from. 

Overall I found it particularly interesting to discuss with an inter-disciplinary group Spotify. It was fascinating to hear the passionate arguments of those for and against it. A lot of people are on Spotify, and therefore it is interesting to see how those who use it to listen, distribute and create music think about it.