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Project 3

A video interview with Shaun Mealey from the band Living Awake.  Here I ask him about his experience releasing music as well as his opinions on Spotify.

A Twitter account I created dedicated to discussing the merits of Spotify.  On here I advertise my other genres as well as tweet information on the issue.

Genre 3: Poster
Project 3 Process Report

          For my project 3 I decided that I wanted to do a Twitter account from the perspective of a band member trying to release music short story and a poem relating to my subject for project 2, the effects of Spotify on artists.  After getting feedback I realized that these ideas needed to be improved for the final product.  I decided to ditch the short story and poem.  I kept the Twitter account but I changed it into the perspective of a journalist investigating the controversy with Spotify instead.  I had next planned on doing a video interview on a separate person than I did for my interview for project 2.  My final genre was going to be a newspaper article as a culmination of my research which I would then post onto the Twitter account.  This was later changed to a poster that advertised the interview.

 

          For the Twitter account, I mainly just posted tweets with tidbits of information regarding the effects of Spotify on artists.  I also advertised my other genres by sending out tweets linking them or talking about them.  I got people to follow my Twitter account by following other people’s accounts.  I also spread the news about my new account by telling all my friends to follow it as well as to tell people they might know about it.  The Twitter account was my main hub for project 3 as I posted all my other genres on it so the entire project could be accessed from a single place.

 

          My second genre was an interview that I conducted with somebody who was in a band and had first hand knowledge about the subject I researched.  I interviewed Shaun Mealey, a guitarist from the band Living Awake.  I got his take on a few of the main points that I went over in my project 2.  He had a very interesting approach to the issue of compensation of artists on Spotify.  He said that he viewed music as a product that the artists create and that people should buy these products.  I first sent Shaun a copy of the questions that I planned on asking him so he would be prepared to give answers when the time for the interview came around.  I then met up with him one afternoon to film the actual interview.  We went to one of the study rooms on campus and I set up my phone and recorded and asked some questions.  I later uploaded this footage onto the computer and did some slight editing before uploading to YouTube.  I advertised this genre by tweeting a link to the video on my twitter account as well as sending the link to multiple friends for them to view.  In my opinion, this was the most interesting of my three genres because it allowed me to get another opinion on the subject that I put a lot of research into.

 

          My final genre was a poster that I made to advertise the interview.  I made it on the website Canva and took a screenshot of it for my use.  I then tweeted a picture of the poster on my Twitter account to get people to look at it.  I also used this photo as the profile picture for the Twitter account because I thought it would look nice and represent what the page was about well.

 

I also ended up posting the new article that I created onto my Twitter account.  It was not one of my genres but I felt that it was important for the page because it actually gave information about the topic.  That way when somebody viewed the page they would be able to get enough information to be able to understand what was talked about from a deeper level. 

          My opinion of the community that Spotify affects did not change over the course of this project.  Because of the widespread use of these online streaming services, the discourse community of this project is a very large and diverse group.  While the main group that this project would affect would be people that use Spotify as their primary method of listening to music, everyone else is still included in it as well.  My initial thought s about the community were that people just did not know that much about how Spotify affected artists and just used the platform because of how convenient it is both monetarily and due to it having many songs all in one place.  As I talked to people about my project and what I had uncovered during the research during project 2, I found that I was mostly correct.  Most people did not know about how some artists were opposed to the way Spotify operates.  I came to this conclusion initially because before I engaged on this project I did not know much about how Spotify interacted with artist and always wondered how the service could offer all this music for free when it used to be that music had to be bought from a retailer.  This ended up being why I chose the topic in the first place.

          The main difference between this project and the essay of project 2 was that in this one all the information was already laid out for me.  In the second project I had to go out and do all the research in order to write the paper but here I just had to take what I already knew or had written and change the way that it was presented.  This project also had a more creative side to it because there was not one guideline we had to follow it was based off of what we had envisioned.  I would say that I enjoyed the investigative aspect of project 2 more because I had fun finding out the actual information regarding the issue.

          Overall I do think that the project was effective.  My goal was just to spread awareness of how Spotify affected artists, both the benefits as well as the adverse effects.  I felt that my project was an easy way for people to view the information that I researched and form their own opinions of the subject.  The information on the Twitter account was the main contributor to the education as well as the interview giving a first hand account.  

2017 by Clayton Partlow.  Proudly created with Wix.com

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