International Journal of Music Business Research, vol. 1, no. 2, October 2012

In the recently published issue of the International Journal of Music Business Research the following articles are included:

Customer experience management in the music industry online communities by Jari Salo, Professor of Marketing at the Oulu Business School/Finland.

The new artrepreneur – how artists can thrive on a networked music business by Maike Engelmann, Lorenz Grünewald and Julia Heinrich, best paper award winner of the Young Scholars’ Workshop of the 3rd Vienna Music Business Research Days 2012.

How media prosumers contribute to social innovation in today’s new networked music culture and economy by Carsten Winter, Full Professor for Media and Music Management at the Department of Journalism and Communication Research (IJK) at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media/Germany.

Click here for full version vol. 1, no. 2, October 2012 of the International Journal of Music Business Research

Australian Music Business – An Analysis of the ARIA Charts, 1988-2011 – Part 1

In this blog the early music industry in Australia was analysed in great detail (The Early Record Industry in Australia – part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6). In a four part series on the Australian music business I would like to highlight the recent economic situation of the Australian music industry. In the first part of this series the charts of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) are analysed to understand the consumers’ taste downunder especially in respect to the Australian national repertoire. In the second part the question is answered, which labels benefited from the chart successes of international and domestic artists. In a third part the development of the recorded music sales in Australia from 2000 to 2011 is analysed to give an explanation for the ups and downs in the observed period. In the fourth and last part of the series the economic role of collecting societies in Australia is highlighted especially from the licensing income’s perspective.

However, in the following the question is answered what artists were appreciated most by Australian music consumers and thus benefited by successes in the ARIA charts.

Creativity and Innovation in der Music Industry – 2nd edition

It is unusual to make a review of a book’s second edition. However, when “Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry” was published in 2006 the outcome of the great transformation process of the music industry was anything than clear. Therefore, it was a great opportunity to revisit the developments in the music industry in the first five years after the millenium and to extent the historic analysis until 2011. This results in a total revision of the chapter on the “Digital Revolution” in the music industry. In the revised version the ongoing process of oligopolization of the recorded music industry is highlighted as well as the market entry of players from outside the industry in the music market. It is also shown that the digital revolution has transformed an initially album driven to a single track market that accounts for the sales slump of recorded music rather than file sharing did – as I pointed out extensively in this blog. However, the main finding in the second edition is that the digital revolution does not only create a totally new value-added network in the music indutsry, but results also in the emergence of a new aesthetic paradigm, just as Jazz became in the 1920s and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1950s. Therefore we can call the current paradigm shift in the music industry the “Digital Music Revolution”, since electronic dance music has the potential to impact the music creation for decades. “Instead of a song, which can be attributed to creators, a digital track can be used, changed, mixed and transformed. Music, therefore, will become fluid, which will chnage not only the existing copyright regime but also the meaning of music in a new social and cultural context” (pp. 196).

 

Peter Tschmuck, 2012, Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 2^nd edition, Springer Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-642-28429-8, e-ISBN 978-3-642-28430-4

Print copies can be directly ordered from Springer Publishing. However single book chapters are also available as an eBook version.

International Journal of Music Business Research – April 2012, vol. 1, no. 1

One might wonder if there is a need for an academic journal on the music business. Several high-profile trade publications on the music business are published regularly and in the torrent of academic journals one can find titles that focus on popular music, the creative industries, cultural economics and arts management. Nevertheless, there is a gap for a publication wholly dedicated to the academic research of music business and industry topics. The International Journal of Music Business Research (IJMBR) tries to fill this gap by providing a new platform for publication of articles on the phenomena of the music economy from different scientific perspectives.

The first issue of the IJMBR reflects a wide range of music business research topics that fit within the scope of the journal’s remit. In a theoretical piece, Patrik Wikström argues that the economic value created from recorded music is increasingly based on context rather than on ownership and that the focus of music distribution should shift from download and streaming to contextual models of music experience. The second paper is contributed by Pinie Wang, who highlights, in a historical analysis, the complex inter-relationship between the US media, advertising and music industries. Martin Kretschmer then addresses his contribution to the recent EU-copyright term extension for sound recordings, proposing that copyright interests should be transferable only for an initial term of 10 years, after which they will revert to the creator. This should lead to a remarkable decrease in orphaned work and should foster creativity and innovation.

Click here for the first issue of the International Journal of Music Business Research (IJMBR)

If you want to submit an article for publication in the IJMBR please send it to: music.business.research@gmail.com

Peter Jenner on the Digital Revolution in the Music Industry and the Need for an International Music Registry

On November 23, 2011 the British music manager and record producer Peter Jenner gave a talk on the digital revolution in the music industry and the need for an International Music Registry (IMR) at the Institute of Culture Management and Culture Studies (IKM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Peter Jenner has managed Pink Floyd, T Rex, Ian Dury, Roy Harper, The Clash, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Robyn Hitchcock, Baaba Maal and Eddi Reader (Fairground Attraction), Billy Bragg and others. He works at Sincere Management and was the Secretary General of the International Music Managers’ Forum, a director of the UK Music Managers’ Forum and is involved on the advisory board of the Featured Artists Coalition. Currently he is a consultant for the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization (WIPO) to help in the development of  an International Music Registry. More on this project and the rationale behind it can be read in the following abridged version of Peter Jenner’s talk, which was not only authorised but also edited by himself.

The Early Recording Industry in the Czech Lands – Part 2

Guest post by Daniel Matoušek

Until now, there has not been much literature on the recording industry in the former Czechoslovakia.  Particularly the history after the 1950s is not mapped at all yet. However, there are two books about the early music industry in the Czech lands that stand out in scope and in depth of detail: “Fonogram I” and “Fonogram II” by Czech record collector and sound industry historian Gabriel Gössel. The following short series of four articles is thus a look into the history of early gramophone industry in the Czech lands as described in these two volumes.

This second part looks at the period of 1920s, when Czechoslovakia emerged as  an independent state with a flourishing market economy, but became also a victim of the Great Depression at the end of the decade.

How Bad Is Music File Sharing? – Part 15

In his 2009 working paper, Leung constructed a dataset from 884 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota to demonstrate that music file sharing does hurt record sales. However, music file sharing contributes approximately 20% to iPod sales. How the author came to these results by a conjoint analysis is further discussed below.

how bad is music file sharing? – part 2

In his working paper entitled “On-line Piracy and Recorded Music Sales”, David Blackburn used a dataset combining weekly album sales data from Nielsen SoundScan with data of file sharing activity on the 5 largest sharing networks in the U.S. (Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey, iMesh, and Overnet) provided by BigChampagne over more than 60 weeks between September 2002 and November 2003. The results showed that “(…) file sharing is reducing the sales of ex ante popular artists while redistributing some of these lost sales to smaller, less well known artists” (Blackburn 2004: 41). However, “(…) the aggregate effect of file sharing on sales is quite strongly negative” (Blackburn 2004: 6). “[T]he estimates suggest that a 30% across-the-board reduction in the number of files shared would have resulted in an additional 66 million albums sold in 2003, an increase of approximately $330 million in profits” (Blackburn 2004: 6).

The recession in the music industry – a cause analysis

Filesharing is made primarily responsible for the decline in sales in the phonographic industry, especially in the CD segment (see the current IFPI Digital Music Report). However, serious research on filesharing behavior (see Huygen et al 2009, Andersen/Frenz 2007, Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf 2007 (working-paper March 2004), Blackburn 2004) shows that filesharing use does not necessarily have a negative impact on physical and digital sales. But if this is not the case, then there must be other causes for the now decade-long recession. In the following I would like to discuss alternative explanations for the recession in the music industry and try to substantiate them empirically.

The CD is dead! Long live the music download?

The economic crisis exacerbates the recession in the music industry. Recorded music sales have been in sharply decline for years. Digital music offerings on the Internet and via mobile phone cannot compensate for the losses. One reason: The wrong licensing policies of the record labels.

The music industry cannot escape the general economic and financial crisis. In 2008 a dramatic slump in sales of recorded music for nearly all markets was reported. But the economic crisis only reinforces a downturn in the market for recorded music that begun already in the late 1990s. Thus, in the largest music markets the CD unit sales dropped in the period from 2000 to 2008 between 35% (United Kingdom) and 59% (USA). This recession, however, is a symptom of a paradigm shift from music delivered in form of a physical product to music as a service delivered in form of online and mobile music offerings.