The RGS Gazette The Arts 25 Issue 12 July 2024 and this small addition has ended up making Spotify the second biggest audiobook service in the world, after Audible. Currently, premium members can listen to audiobooks for 15 hours per month on Spotify, with extra 10hour batches for £9.99. Last year, Spotify made £244 million from audiobooks alone! Despite this, it still sounds impossible to use audiobooks to create the £9.79 billion made from premium subscriptions last year. However, after some calculations and a bit of estimation, it turns out this goal is far from impossible. In total, Spotify made a total of around £10 billion last year from audiobooks and premium subscriptions. There are 600 million worldwide listeners, and roughly ¼ of them listen to audiobooks regularly. Therefore, for Spotify to gain £10 billion, each of these audiobook listeners needs to pay £67 per year. With these facts, it can be determined that an audiobook subscription of £6.99 per month would create the required profit to offset the cost of removing Spotify Premium, as well as creating extra profit. So why would Spotify ever do this? For starters, Spotify’s market value has been slowly declining, and their shares have been decreasing. This move, though, would skyrocket their numbers of listeners. In addition, the subscription for Audible is £7.95 per month. By making this audiobook subscription £6.99 per month, they will also attract all the Audible customers who want the same value of audiobooks for a lower price, increasing Spotify’s profit by more than predicted. "Spotify's market value has been slowly declining." Even though it might sound irrelevant to your daily lives, I find it intriguing how something seemingly impossible on the surface can be very achievable if one takes the time and puts in the effort to achieve it. I never thought that this change would work in practice, but after researching for a while and doing quite a lot of maths, it was much easier than expected. I think this is a great mindset to have, and I hope you can find some use for it in your daily lives. To study, or not to study, that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of William Shakespeare or to take arms against a sea of his plays and oppose the end of their study. I will be exploring Shakespeare’s domination over the school curricula and will be reevaluating his in modern society and its teaching. In the Elizabethan era, society was steeped in rigid hierarchies and entrenched prejudices, deeply influencing Shakespeare’s works. The period was marked by extreme racial and gender inequalities, with nonEuropeans often seen as inferior and women confined to subservient roles. Shakespeare’s plays reflect these biases, sometimes reinforcing negative stereotypes. An example of these negative ideologies is a racist quote from Othello which illustrates this: “An old black ram is tupping your white ewe” (Act 1, Scene 1), where Iago uses derogatory imagery. Similarly, sexist attitudes are evident in Hamlet: “Frailty, thy name is a woman!” (Act 1, Scene 1), where Hamlet condemns his mother’s perceived weakness, generalising this trait to all women. These quotes underscore the prejudices of the time, both critiquing and perpetuating societal stereotypes. Shakespeare’s oeuvre, penned in Early Modern English, poses formidable linguistic challenges due to its archaic lexicon and intricate syntactic structured. Obsolete term’s like, “Wherefore” (meaning “why”) and “thou” an (informal “you”), complicate comprehension. His sophisticated wordplay, rich metaphors, and rhetorical flourishes demand advanced literary acumen. Moreover, the flexible word order in his iambic pentameter can obscure meaning for contemporary readers and audiences accustomed To Study, or Not to Study Oliver James (Year 10) debates whether the works of Shakespeare have a place in the modern curriculum Spotify mobile app (2024) 'Othello' (1995)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODA2Njk=