The evidence is that blockchain has the power to start a disruptive process. If blockchain has uses for the music industry a framework will need to be defined to prevent damage. A collaborative ...approach, agile methods, and transition management are identified and suggested as a toolset to successfully shape the impact of the disrupted processes. In particular, transition management is recommended as an approach via research. Blockchain concepts are matched to the music industry through examples.
The creative industries, and particularly our UK Music industry, are perceived as healthy, resilient and strong. However, with the ongoing policy changes in secondary and higher education, as well as ...the continued cuts to council budgets and the ongoing lack of commitment to wealth distribution and even investment in the whole nation, this golden era of the creative industries in the UK may not last. In my latest articles, I explore critical themes relevant for the UK Music industry and the UK creative sector as a whole. Current national policy expressions often omit to address these themes, which are necessary to safeguard our future creative resilience. In writing this article, much relevance will be drawn from making connections to recent public debates on what universities are for and what their role is within the creative economy. Attention is given to considering current governmental industry strategies critically and their relevance for the music industry, together with their sector responses.
Digitalization allows new entrants to enter and transform industries with new technologies or business models. Often, these new entrants introduce digital platforms that modify prevalent value ...creation and capture mechanisms to allow them to take on powerful keystone positions. While prior research has mostly analysed the organizational consequences for firms, we follow a growing field of interest studying the effects of digital platforms on business ecosystems and explore when and how platformization of a business ecosystem occurs. Our study of the platformization of the Dutch music industry from the 1990s to 2016 makes two contributions. First, we identify two mechanisms that drive the platformization of business ecosystems: digital transaction platforms reconfigure value capture as well as value creation, and translators – a new actor-type proficient in digital technologies – emerge that help incumbent keystone actors translate physical products into digital offerings. Second, we theorize this process as business ecosystem envelopment; a viable strategy for digital transaction platforms to absorb a traditional business ecosystem's focal offering without taking over its functionality.
Why is it that technology-enabled industry disruptions appear entirely inevitable with hindsight, yet practitioners in disrupted businesses typically struggle to detect and respond appropriately to ...disruption while it is unfolding? We term this surprising contradiction ‘interpretive discontinuity’ and use it to problematize the established understanding of disruption in the literature. We suggest that the contradiction at the heart of interpretive discontinuity holds an important key to what exactly changes during disruption and why. By juxtaposing an empirical case of disruption in the music industry with theoretical resources sensitive to the nature of radical change – Thomas Kuhn’s work in the unrelated field of scientific practice – we demonstrate that it is productive to understand disruption as a Kuhnian paradigm shift. We are then able to trace interpretive discontinuity to the gestalt switch in worldview that accompanies such a paradigm shift. This insight sheds new light on both what is actually ‘disruptive’ about disruption and also on the limitations of prior work theorizing disruption. Our work is important because it adds to the literature on disruptive innovation important yet overlooked conceptual tools in Kuhn’s work – the role of exemplars, the worldview aspect of a paradigm, and paradigm incommensurability.
Musicians are believed to increasingly “optimize” their music to positively influence discoverability and engagement on music and social media platforms. Common examples of such optimization ...strategies are skipping intros, quickly moving to the chorus, or inserting danceable “hooks.” But to what extent are optimization strategies actively considered in the creative production process? And, if so, in what stage of production? In this article, we explore how professional musicians reflect on the opportunities and constraints that optimization strategies offer in the creative music production process. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with early to mid-career professional musicians and songwriters, we identify four different positions between “pure” artistic autonomy and “pure” commercialism that musicians typically take on in relation to these optimization strategies. We demonstrate that musicians are aware that sonically “working towards” platforms may bring economic success, while simultaneously maintaining a general reluctance towards outright commercial, “full optimization” ideologies.
Drawing from interviews with staff who sign and work with musicians and songwriters in the Chinese music industry, this article adopts the concepts of ‘cultural intermediary’ and ‘platform adaptor’ ...to trace a series of transformations since the post-1978 market reforms up to the present day. We argue that significant artistic and cultural shifts have occurred as the creative practices of music planners at record companies are superseded by content operators more narrowly focused on constructing content at digital platforms and adapting songs to short video platforms. The article locates the affordances of new media within a broader context of change and continuity in the Sinophone popular music world, contributing new knowledge about the work of music industry personnel involved in artist acquisition and repertoire development, adding to scholarship on an important yet under researched period in the history of the Chinese music industries.
Sustainability is not just a trend, but an important part of our everyday life including the satisfaction of human needs and preservation of a healthy business environment for present and future ...generations. The objective of this study is to provide an empirical approach for how to achieve the sustainable success in the music industry. As consumers’ utility toward a certain music product can be shifted up or down depending on the elements that constitute the music, we investigate the effect of musical elements on the consumer’s choice of music. We quantitatively measure the effects using hierarchical Bayesian logit choice model allowing for the individual heterogeneity. Based on the results, we find that utilizing musical components plays critical roles in understanding and predicting consumer choice. In addition, our findings suggest how music marketers can come up with a desirable configuration for music products. Sustainability in the music industry can be justified by whether musical components are well aligned, consistent with consumers’ preference.
PDF
