Fair enough, but if it was at work or something you can at least say, ‘eh at least I still get paid’ Here you have no recourse options.
edit: Having read the translation now. It seems the students do have a choice in which software suite they use. So I guess they did have a recourse. So in the end it was their own responsibility. I guess it was a good lesson then.
Spotifyd is a Spotify daemon, not an user application. It makes perfect sense to run as a service. Though personally I would run it as a user service instead of a system service.