The new issue features three excellent unique and diverse papers that shed fresh and novel insights on the modern music business and this is exemplified by “Rockonomics Revisited”, as well as “Innovation Diffusion” and “The Distinctiveness of Electronic Dance Music”.
“Rockonomics Revisited” by Adam Fer and Barbara Baarsma of the University of Amsterdam is taking its reference point as Krueger’s well-known 2005 “Rockonomics” paper that examined the complimentary relationship between declining record sales and rising ticket prices. The “Innovation Diffusion” paper by Alexander Brem (University of Southern Denmark) and Michael Reichert (Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg) investigates the importance of product and organisational Innovation particularly in a music industry with historical failure rates of 90 percent. “The distinctiveness of Electronic Dance Music” by Job van der Velde and Erik Hitters of Erasmus University Rotterdam begs the question whether the Dance (or EDM) genre is distinctive relative to existing music industries structures. They argue the differences between the EDM labels and rest of the music industry can be traced to the embedded digital technologies, the rise of independent labels filling the post-Napster vacuum left by the major labels and the fact the new entrants focus on live as opposed to recorded music revenues. A book review by Daniel Nordgård on “Business Innovation and Disruptions in the Music Industry”, edited by Patrik Wikström and Robert DeFillippi, complements for the first time the current IJMBR issue.
Volume 5, no 1, April 2016
Editorial by Dennis Collopy, pp. 4-5
Music Business Research 
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