Evolving bildung in the nexus of streaming services, art and users – Spotify as a case
Professor Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist has been awarded almost SEK 4 million from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Memorial Fund for a new project that examines the importance of streaming media in general and Spotify in particular.
“It feels amazing and a bit unreal. After all the time I've spent applying for funding for various projects, it's finally paying off. The fact that the foundation believes in the project and thinks it is important is very stimulating and it feels exciting to get started with it all. We are a group of people who have worked purposefully with the support of Cross-border art and technology, and I am very proud that the collaborative work has worked and paid off”, says Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist, professor at Luleå University of Technology and emphasizes how welcome the financial contribution is for the study.
Not possible without the grant
“It means that we can actually start the project for real and implement it, which would not have been possible without the financial support. It allows the research team to meet and have time to carry out this truly cross-border project.”
The project is called Evolving bildung in the nexus of streaming services, art and users – Spotify as a case and examines what function streaming music, and other art expressions, can have in people's lives, and how technical streaming companies, such as Spotify, relate to and interact with these functions.
Asking new questions
“We need to ask new questions about the relationship between people's lives and streaming music, but also other art, to understand how people can be offered experiences that enable them to create meaning, to become themselves and to understand and manage the world,” says Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist, who believes that the research is in demand.
“We know a lot about, for example, listening habits and file sharing, but we need to know more about what it really means in people's lives or what influences the strong experiences and how economics, law, technology and ideology relate to it. Even companies like Spotify probably need to know more in order to broaden their offerings.”
The project is transnational and involves different disciplines such as netnography, ethnography, big data analysis, sound quality analysis and philosophical studies. By the end of the project, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist hopes that knowledge about streaming media will have deepened.
“I hope we will have answers that show how technical, economic, audio, pedagogical and artistic parameters can be combined to offer people meaningful art experiences. We aim to deepen the knowledge of streaming media in relation to education and innovative approaches to learning through streaming media platforms. We also envision that the results can offer insights of importance to streaming media product developers, teachers, students and democracy-oriented initiatives at the government level.”
Updated: