Introduction
This is an insight on how the conversation about music has changed with new music sharing applications, such as Spotify. Analyzing Reddit conversations shows how the conversations have changed, how self-promotion has changed, and how Spotify has changed music sharing through playlists.
Literature Review
Abstract
The world of music sharing has changed drastically within the past decade. While music sharing was heavily based off of emotional feelings and caring, it has now shifted to something much more complex. This complexity has not just come out of the blue, but rather has been a changing process throughout the years. With the development of social media, music sharing apps, iPhones, and easier forms of communication music sharing has lost its emotional connection and has taken on a new form of meaning. This meaning is much more complex and varies. Journeying through sources, Spotify has increasingly been influencing the modern day of music sharing through emotion and meaning. This continues on to Spotify’s unique sharing and promotional features that help create hits and easy-to-make playlists for its users.
How music sharing apps like Spotify fit into the world of social media
A bigger issue is how do music sharing apps fit into the world of social media and what defines those requirements? “Internet-based applications and websites that promote the sharing of user-generated content, communication, and participation on a large scale,” (Cooper 1). This is exactly what Spotify does. The user generates playlists and is able to share them across large scale areas of other users. These users can now interact with the content by saving the playlist, listening to the playlist, and being able to save/listen to individual songs within the playlist as a whole. Now looking at how Spotify compares to other popular social platforms like Facebook. “Facebook allows users to build a personal profile that includes pictures and cultural interests, to exchange messages, and to share thoughts, pictures, and videos. Facebook allows for mpore customization and requires users to give their true identity, which platforms like MySpace did not,” (Cooper 2). The customization aspect is important for users, Spotify allows profile images and allows customization to a certain point. However, people that are using music applications are more focused on the music. Which in this case, it’s safe to argue that the customizable content that Cooper mentions is the users playlists on Spotify. The users content is stuff that they are creating for others to view and share, which is exactly what the playlists are doing.
How Spotify can simplify the music sharing process
People have no switched to music sharing applications such as Spotify because the process is much easier and user friendly. The amount of time it takes to create a digital playlist and have it posted on the users profile for anyone to see is minimal. “Last month, Spotify reported that is has 60 million subsribers—a 100 percent jump from last year, Apple music has 27 million. More than half od Spotify users listen to the service’s constantly updated playlists, like Today’s Top Hits, which has more than 16 million subscribers,” (Knopper 1). These playlists aren’t just set in stone, but they are easily updateable and are changed instantly. Spotify has created music advertising like no other. Artist can now make their own playlists and share them with their listeners, listeners can create their own playlists, and Spotify can release their own playlists. “Spotify playlists can broaden audiences in a big way,” (Knopper 2). Because of the share ability that Spotify provides, as an artist it is much easier to gain new influencers from around the world.
Collaboration in Spotify
“Demonstrating the ability to collaborate effectively is essential for students moving into the 21st century workplaces. Employers are expecting new hires to already possess group-work skills and will seek evidence of their ability to cooperate, collaborate, and complete projects with colleagues, including remotely or at a distance,” (Stephens & Roberts 1). The key still of collaboration is become more relevant in the world today. As technology continues to adapt and change so does the way people communicate. Music sharing is one of those things that has changed a long with it. Instead of having a physical hard copy of the music, it has now become completely digital. It is this sense of I now own this music and I can gift it to you through playlists. Spotify is made of collaboration. Playlists being made and people listening and sharing them, the playlist has started somewhere and has its owner but it can be changed or recreated by someone else. Collaboration creates positive impacts by engagement with peers, according to Stephens & Roberts. When a person creates a playlist on Spotify, they now become a personal D.J. for the user. The user is listening to something that the creator put together to serve a certain emotional purpose. This follows under the Facilitating Collaboration in Online Groups (FCOG) according to Stephen & Roberts which states four phases. Phase 1 entails creating a group set and themed groups using self-enrollment, phase 2 provides instructors with suggestions on how to detail the operational and performance expectations for groups and individual members within the groups, phase 3 instructors are provided with web-based communication tools and pedagogical suggestions to help students use them more effectively. Finally phase 4 provides more examples and illustrations of assignments and activities that use the FCOG strategy.
“The first phase of the FCOG strategy is for the online instructor to create formal groups of students,” (Stephens & Roberts 2). This first phase needs to be pictured as Spotify being the online instructor. Spotify has created musical categories/genres to help people fit their playlists into categories of people with same musical taste. “In addition to guiding students through how to self-enroll in one of the themed groups, providing them with information related to the importance and benefits of working in groups to achieve collective goals,” (Stephens & Roberts 3). This phase goes with experience and how much creditability a playlist has. If the playlist has more followers it then becomes more credible. If the playlist has a low amount of followers the playlist becomes less credible. These set expectations for users that are browsing through a certain genre, if the playlist has credibility it is more likely to be listened to, plus it appears before those that do not have followers. Phase 3 now provides users with choices in communication tools, it is critical for collaboration (Stephens & Roberts 4). This is then the decision that is made upon the user. Is this user going to now follow the playlist maker, is the user just going to follow the playlist, or is the user just going to browse through the playlist and save individuals songs that are of interest. Lastly, phase 4 which is focused on development. This is done through Spotify on the user now being aware of new music and therefore, the user is now able to create new content using that song or playlist. This allows something completely new to birth and turn into a playlist or a combination of certain songs that no one has heard before.
Why the Pirates haven’t found Spotify
The Pirates Bay was a popular music downloading site that allowed users to upload their own content into their own categories. This music sharing site did not abide by any legal copyrights. This allowed anyone to upload anything and anyone to download anything that was uploaded. While the collaboration aspect is quite similar to Spotify, it couldn’t be more different. “Due to its mobilization of millions of users and the hosting of about 5 million torrent files, The Pirates Bay can speak with a disdainful or irreverent voice against the established power structures of the music industry. In this way it questions the view of consumers as passive content recipients and the business logic of paying for the carrier,” (Wikhamn & Knights 46). Being an “active” user means paying for content and making sure no copyright issues are violated. This is people purchasing CDs and Spotify can fall under this category. A “passive: user is getting free content, potentially violating copyright issues such as The Pirates Bay. “Spotify is a new way to listen to music. Any track you like, any time you like. Just search for it on Spotify, then play it. Any artist, any album, any genre-all available instantly. With Spotify, there are no limits to the amount of music you can listen to. Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it,” (Wikhamn & Knights 44). Spotify has changed the realm of the music sharing industry, as people can now pay a monthly fee to listen to unlimited amounts of music while still giving the artists their share of profits.
How Spotify creates hits
“To content providers, the focus is put on being a new distribution channel to a large customer base through a service safe from illegal use and with a business model in place to protect the income streams of intellectual property owners. In this way, Spotify rather acts as a savior to the music industry, supporting the big corporations in the war against pirates,” (Wikhamn & Knights 46). A lot of the music is stuff that wouldn’t normally seem as if it would be popular. However, a majority of the music listened to is Peaceful Piano and Deep Focus. These have songs that are on the more chill side of things, which a lot of people prefer to listen to when studying or working. The more they rack up, as far as listeners, the big paydays comes quick for the copyright owners. “Music, like other imaginary or creative works, is particularly subitle for content or socially based recommendation tools for two reasons: firstly, with creative works like music, what is sought after is the emotive experience it evokes, which is more difficult to express than topical knowledge in traditional information retrieval system. Secondly, unlinked in the problem solving information retrieval context where search behaviors are driven by pre-existing information need, in creative works like music, the desire to consume a product often takes place after, rather than before users’ first encounter with the information,” (Tang & Yang 1).
Conclusion
“Empirical research on music-induced emotions provides convincing evidence that music does indeed elict certain emotions and moods in listeners,” (Rentfrow 406). While emotion is still key in music sharing, there is now a heavier weight placed on sharing something much deeper, identity. When the sharing of music CDs or mixtapes was still the popular form of music sharing this was mainly for your crush. As media has portrayed this best, with a guy creating a mixtape to show how in love he is with his crush. It is also showed as a guy holding a stereo outside of his crushes window, emphasizing how much he wants to be with her. Making playlists has now served as a temporary identity for someone to share how they are feeling in a certain moment, creating a feeling of learning who someone is in their different moods. Not a lot of research has been done in the changing of how music sharing has adapted in the past few years, but it is a huge part of American culture. Continuing the research in this direction, will potentially identify some of the key parts of how music sharing has changed.
Method
Choosing these sources was not easy, as it is hard to identify the parts of much music sharing, as it has changed so much over the past century. With updates to the social media, music sharing, marketing, and online music collaboration, there has been a shift in music sharing and its meaning. By analyzing how Spotify creates hits, this ultimately leads to how people are hearing about the music. Once people have heard the music, they are wanting to share their music taste with others. This creates a kind of identity with the music, defining themselves as the listeners personal D.J. that is sharing this new music. This can also go to include the social psychology of music sharing and how it affects the mind of both the user and the listener. This also in a sort of way creating a way of listeners feeling like they are listening to new content, but every time they are hearing the new content they are relating it back to the person that created it.
Collecting data was actually quite an easy task. Looking through different conversations was the original goal, but where to find those conversations was a challenge. Browsing through on Spotify’s music conversations through the application there was more of sharing playlists and self-promotion, but it was missing the conversational element. Turning to Reddit it was much easier to find these conversations, while keeping the self-promotion and music sharing in the conversations. These conversations are what keeps these trending topics alive on Reddit, with people all over the world able to contribute, the personalities are varied. Searching “Spotify conversations” a lot of data popped up on my screen. There are so many individual threads to analyze, it was hard to find one to choose. I will in the future analyze multiple threads hoping to find more of the different areas I am looking at. However, in this one particular one that I chose, titled “I made a Spotify playlist from the Reddit discussion about the most beautiful songs.” This conversation is about a collaboration of the most beautiful pieces of music and some of the topics within this thread are interesting and show a lot about self-promotion, music sharing, and music opinions. These conversations have changed drastically from previous time periods because they were not capable of creating playlists through applications, like Spotify. I think choosing to go with this data is something that will give me a lot of areas to generate discussion and analysis about how Spotify has changed the musical conversation, playlist sharing, and self-promotion of sharing music.
Data
Thread 1 part 1
—SCAN IN DATA PAGES HERE—
Word count: 129
Likes/ dislikes: 40
Artist mentions: 6
Personal comments: 83
This conversation is important to me because it start off simple. This conversation starts off by just simply defining some of the basics in musical conversation. The people also start to give off hints of what defines beauty in music, there are also quite a few new artist mentions that spark interest in the term beauty. Comments like “they liked”, “love both versions”, “so much”, “simply beautiful”, “another one of my favorites”, these types of comments are general likings for these individuals. These comments play an important role in the conversation because it helps direct the more in depth conversations of what, to these people, define as beautiful. During times before music sharing applications, like Spotify, is was hard to generate examples because there was no physical presence of text and or music. It was all by conversation. This forum allows people to share physical music files and makes specific references giving individuals a different conversational medium.
Through these simple terms a much more intense conversation is slowly developed throughout this thread. “I dig the acoustic version more”, “stranger and or more powerful”, “makes an incredible song so much more personal for me”, these types of comments is where the defining of beauty becomes almost undefinable. New terms, like stranger and powerful, come into the conversation adding a new layer to the conversation. I think this conversation would not have happened without sharing applications like Spotify, this has allowed for people to have access to new music that they normally wouldn’t have access to. Not only do they have access to a more broad range of music, but they also are able to converse with people from all over the world, especially, through an forum like Reddit, people have joined from all over the world. This brings in a new culture, a new understanding, new ideas, and most of all new music to the conversations. While at the same time a playlist is being generated from all of the new culture, the new understandings, and the new ideas. This playlist has become something special. This has not only created a new piece of music, but not this can be shared with others to spark more conversation and to take this playlist and make it something even bigger. This, I think , has taken on a much deeper level of music conversation.
Thread 1 part 2
—SCAN IN DATA PAGES HERE—
Word count: 288
Likes/ dislikes: 99
Artist mentions: 19
Personal comments: 170
This part of the conversation is much more deep, it is further along in the thread once all of the general analysis of “I like this” to “I don’t like this” has already been said and established. The conversation begins to turn and go more in depth. “One of the most beautiful and original pieces of music I’ve ever listened to”, “I find your lack of taste disturbing”, the conversations change. They become much more specific. They begin to generate new ideas of what defines beauty through these conversations. Artist not having a flowing, smooth voice can change whether a song is beautiful or not. They call out Alt-J’s lead singer for having a harsh voice. This conversation about Alt-J goes into talking about individual songs such as Tessellate and Warm Foothills, talking about if they had a different vocalist their music could be considered beautiful, as their composition of instruments is luscious, they could do without the lead singer.
This then takes on an even larger conversation later on taking about beauty in traditional voices and unusual voices. “It’s the reason people love artists like Tom Waites, or Janis Joplin, or Conor Oberst. It’s the reason Picasso and Dali and Jackson Pollock are famous. Beauty is subjective- no one agrees what it is and isn’t, but everyone knows when they see it.” This response or even the ideas in this response would not have been shared with others if it weren’t for Spotify existing. This Spotify playlist has create a buzz of these types of conversations and will continue to create them. There just isn’t that high of a probability of finding people like this that these people can engage in this level of conversation. While this wasn’t done on Spotify, Spotify is what initially started the conversations and allowed the music to be listened to in the first place.
Conclusion
I will continue to analyze a few more Reddit threads to find more conversations and aspects of what I am looking for. In the future, I hope to come up with a larger more detailed argument to defend my thesis. Looking at Reddit threads will help make it easier to find deeper conversation topics that discuss how music sharing has changed.
