Abstract

Sharing music is a traditional mechanism of cultural sociability, the observation of wich is useful in order to understand the negotiation procedures of sense and identity. In the new digital scene, the act of sharing and offering music shows –along with the obvious purpose of establishing relationships with others as well as making them participate in something pleasant– a desire to spread one’s own personal taste and a will to communicate our one’s identity. Thus, now and then, communicating by means of music and sharing it –as well as giving an opinion on it– are ways of both self-representation and expression of one’s identity, offering others some sort of «musical personality»: another way of being in the world, typical of our era and related to a way of using the products of cultural industry with a personal purpose. This use, however, is not restricted to just expressing identity aspects: we use mass culture products in several ways with different purposes in our everyday life. According to some of these other uses, we will expand the field of the main subject of this article: other ways of sharing music that represent both permitted and non-permitted appropriations of music. We will accomplish this by considering some of the reasons that help getting a better understanding of the cultural task carried out by music (and other cultural products).

Abstract

In the last decade, the music industry has become the paradigm of the transformations that has carried the development of the productive system towards Informational Capitalism. Of the hand of a quick technological innovation, not always produced by companies, new forms of production and consumption of music have been developed. This new environment has dragged the phonographic companies to a crisis of sales that has forced a radical transformation for the sake of survival. One of these business transformations has been the intensification of the management of copyright. This intensification occurs mainly in two areas: the extension of the protection deadlines and the expansion of the fields and rights management companies-driven activities. This article is intended to answer the question that lies behind the ambitions to modify the productive system: how create cultural industries capable, at the time, to maintain a common and democratic culture and also to develop initiatives to generate capital gains to musicians, songwriters, and other music professionals. We will use data from a research that have conducted three group interviews segmented by age. The aim is to cross the views and experiences of consumers with the analysis of the evolution of music industry organization. From the observation that the younger generations are installed in a culture of free music, we explore what new business opportunities appear and how are received from the conflicting positions already referred.

Abstract

This paper examines the sustainability of the recorded music industry from the perspective of music performers. Music streaming platforms, or digital music service providers (DMSPs), have changed the recorded music industry paradigm since the middle of the 2010s. Business models for performers have evolved from royalty agreements based on sales to more complex remuneration systems based on revenues from a combination of (ad-based) free and paid subscriptions. Previous research has mainly focused on the examination of the business models of streaming services from the point of view of the innovation players (digital platforms) and/or the traditional dominant intermediaries (record labels and publishers). However, not all innovation-driven transformations are sustainable. In this paper, we argue that the sustainability of the main business models in the music industry demands the consideration of the performers’ perspective. We combine a qualitative approach with primary and secondary data sources to investigate the sustainability of existing trends of business models and business practices for different categories of performers, including both monetary values and a description of how revenues are shared. We conclude that DMSPs foster an asymmetric value chain in which the creative players barely capture value while technology-based innovations increase the capability of DMSPs to generate and capture value. Finally, we outline some alternative business models looking for the long-term sustainability of the digital music marketplace.