How Has Digitalisation Influenced Value in the Music Market?

This paper focuses on how digitalisation has influenced actors’ value determination and value creation in the Swedish music market. It draws on the service-dominant logic (SDL) and the service ecosystem perspective to conceptualise value as co-created through the integration of resources by multiple actors in service exchange, enabled and constrained by institutions and institutional arrangements. Empirically, we draw on a qualitative study of the digitalisation of the Swedish music market that consists of fifty-two interviews with various actors. The findings suggest that digitalisation has influenced service engagement and consequently value creation and determination for various actors, and especially for consumers and producers. This paper contributes by integrating SDL and the service ecosystem perspective into music business research in a novel way to promote a deeper understanding of value, value determination, and value co-creation. This paper also contributes to SDL by suggesting that both value-in-exchange and value-in-use are important aspects of value determination and value co-creation.

Digital Technologies and Music Digitisation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Nepalese Music Industry

This paper investigates the current legitimate digital music business trends and models created by the innovation of new digital technologies and examines their pertinence in the Nepalese music industry. Further, it scrutinises neighbouring music markets and juxtaposes the Nepalese music market against their current market trends. Based on eight in-depth semi-structured interviews with executives and stakeholders of different major, medium and independent Nepalese record labels, the paper examines two questions: what is preventing Nepalese recorded music from being found digitally and accessible legally; and what are the opportunities, gaps and requirements that confront the search for a commercially viable route for the optimal digital music business model to make Nepalese music digitally and legally accessible, both locally and globally?

The Power of Reputation: A Case Study on Artistic Directors of Austria's Music Festivals

Reputation represents the standing of a person or organisation in the public field and illustrates/marks their contribution towards the implementation of collectively shared values and goals. From a business point of view, reputation belongs to the intangible assets of a company and is therefore part of the goodwill. Especially, the leader of an organisation—particularly in a cultural enterprise—shapes the external public image of the organisation, studies the impact of the image on the public consciousness by assessing public opinion about the organisation's achievements and consequently also gauges the economic and/or artistic success of the organisation. Based on the statements of experts about music festivals of high culture in Austria alongside the big players such as Salzburg or Bregenz Festival, the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between reputation of artistic directors (ADs) and the performance of cultural enterprises. It will also be demonstrated how the reputation of these individuals has an impact on tourism, hospitality and trade in the vicinity of cultural enterprises.

Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991) in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire to six music managers based in London (UK), this article interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making.

Resource Integration, Value Co-Creation, and Service-dominant Logic in Music Marketing: The Case of the TikTok Platform

It is a fact that the past research has explored service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and value co-creation in music marketing (Choi & Burnes 2013; Gamble & Gilmorex 2013; Gamble 2018; Saragih 2019), yet a key aspect of S-D logic, namely resource integration, is an unexplored territory and a promising phenomenon of study. A scattering of evidence demonstrates how actors, whether individuals or organisations, in the music industry are making value propositions and providing operand resources to users of platforms (Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019), which may result in resource integration and commercial success at a quick pace and on a global scale. Using secondary data in an archival research approach (Welch 2000), this paper examines TikTok, a rapidly growing platform where users integrate short (e.g., under 15 s) clips of commercial music into user generated video content in which users dance to, lip-sync with, accept social challenges, integrate hashtags and create memes based on musical content. Further, there is a discussion on evidence about how music is being used by actors on TikTok in order to argue that (a) S-D logic (Vargo & Lusch 2016) is an insightful perspective through which one is able to understand music marketing; (b) music providers essentially make value propositions with their music that other actors, such as music consumers, can integrate into their lives through platforms like TikTok; (c) changes in technology affect such resource integration and how actors in the music industry can adapt to such change; (d) value-in-social-context (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber 2010) is a driver of resource integration by users on the platform; and (e) this example of value created by users on TikTok is just one example of the many types of value which guide action and interaction on today’s music platforms. The discussion and analysis is concluded with several implications for research and practice.

Hang with Me—Exploring Fandom, Brandom, and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

Active and co-creative audiences are sought, used, tracked and taken for granted in the quest for strong music brands. Fan communities are co-opted to build value for brands and used to foster communication in transmedia marketing campaigns. However, when focusing on audiences and fans’ digital media activities, digital traces and numbers, important questions of motivations, expectations, experiences, morals and power structures are often overlooked. Drawing on a digital ethnographic study and an interdisciplinary perspective, we investigate a fan community of the Swedish artist Robyn, both online and offline. The article contributes to the concepts of fandom and brandom and the notion of value. It also adds to the knowledge about the perspective of fans and fans’ motivations for taking part and co-creating value in a highly commercialised and strategised music market.