The Medium is the Message: Spotify & Ads technical analysis

Since the year 2015, I've become an avid Spotify fan and I absolutely adore it.

Being a millennial means that I have experiences with collecting CDs. I still remember every single Christmas, the only thing I put on my gift list was name of a single album that I had probably had my eyes on for a while. I had an entire shelf dedicated to all my collections and my mum just couldn't stop nagging about it. To me, music is essential in my everyday life, it is impossible for me to imagine living without any soundtrack.

However, a few years later, iPod arrived. Though, I stayed loyal to my Walkman until a teacher brought me an MP3 player as a parting gift. That was the beginning of me entering the infamous pirate downloading business. I was greedy, my hunger for music was enormous that, obviously, my pocket money cannot be sustained. For a broke teenager, the pirate websites were basically, heaven on earth! My PC was almost constantly on and downloading tons and tons of music 24/7. However, I did not give up on the hobby of creating my own collections, thus, I would still burn the music on to an audio CD, name them, and put into my binder. 

As technology continues to improve, the way I enjoy music begins to change as well. As online streaming became the norm, yet I was still a broke student, I obviously could not afford iTunes. Instead, I bumped into another pirate heaven, all based in China. I enjoyed the free service for a very long while, I had stopped paying for any music in any form, and I wasn't even ashamed of it. To be honest, I felt a wee bit smart back then.

What changed, was when I first arrived in Japan, a rumour I heard from someone else.

"Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"The police specialised in catching pirate downloaders..."

Of course, this most likely was just a joke that someone made up, yet it somehow pushed me to think of the way I consume music. And then, I ran into Spotify on a night in hanging out at my mate's flat.

The streaming service was just so brilliant that I instantly signed up as a paid member, cheers to my mum's credit card. The way I look at it though, it was only a small amount of fee (500yen) to pay per month for basically ALL kinds of music you can possibly think of. Definitely an excellent bargain, is it not?

The most well-known Spotify's slogan, "music for everyone." Supposedly, I would also add, "everywhere." This streaming service makes accessing music so much easier and so much interesting. My favourite feature is that it tracks your listening routine and genres, then introduce you to similar types of music every Monday. Hence, this another slogan from Spotify, "You are what you stream."

There is an interesting and intriguing problem here, whether your music taste shapes up your Spotify collection, or rather, Spotify shapes up your own musical identity?

Probably, the only downside I've realised from using Spotify for years is that I normally put music on shuffle, and with its very own coding design, it smartly plays similar tracks which it assumed the listener will enjoy. With the music blasting through my headphones whilst I'm on the go, I have no time to check who the artist is or even the title of the song, thus, I have started to figure that I have no clue of who my favourite artists are.

I was proud of myself of respecting the copyrights of creators by paying for music, yet, the convenience of streaming music creates another dilemma. How do you pay your respect to the creators when you don't even know who they are?

Indeed, Spotify is amazing in its own way, but being a user, there is a responsibility to understand what the message of this particular medium of music streaming service is sending out.

Ads technical analysis:

However you do Christmas by Tesco UK

Zoom: 9 times including zoom in/zoom out

Cut: 20 times

Shift: 3 times

Sound: BGM on, sound effects, people talking, one-liners