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The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.

This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.

Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.

This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.

As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.

Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.

This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

At the end of this study, students should analyze the re-orientation of innovation music business model strategy to create a new market using the Blue Ocean Strategy of Sun-Eater Records Company. Furthermore, they should be able to implement the business model transformation in the music industry in this digital media era based on data and technological capability. Students should analyze the digital content strategy that is relatable and relevant to music customers/users through content creation. Finally, they need to create the content strategy applicable to promotion and marketing innovatively in the music business.

This study analyzes how a Jakarta-based independent music company, Sun Eater Records, changed its strategy in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The adverse effect of the pandemic on this company included a massive drop in sales of products and revenues from tours, festivals and outdoor music performances. Music industry stakeholders were confused and frustrated because of the restriction and the implementation of the social distancing policy, as most of their business models depended on live music showcases and selling records. The protagonist of this study, Kukuh Rizal Arfianto, is the director and co-founder of Sun Eater Records. Kukuh’s experience during the pandemic is used to capture the dilemma faced by the music industry players in Indonesia. This agile businessman transformed this music company by embracing digitalization. Inspired by the business models of Disney and 88 Rising (Music Management), Sun Eater Records developed various derivatives digital products. The company did not only sell music through digital content, it also developed several complementary products with music as their main theme. These innovative creations include mini-documentary, virtual concerts, compilation albums serial, digital comics, and Covid-19 Campaigns. The company is quite active in leveraging digitalization to survive in this business compared to other industry players. This study provides communication and design students opportunities to analyze how to draft an effective content strategy in the industry, in this case, the music industry.

This case is designed mainly for Management, Innovation, and Digital Communication course at the Bachelor's level program.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the scale of illegal file‐sharing activity across ten countries and to correlate this activity with country revenues. The work aims to elucidate an under‐explored business model challenge which exists in parallel with a music piracy challenge.

The study data are drawn from a number of sources, including a data set of a survey of more than 44,000 consumers in ten different countries undertaken in 2010. Following analysis, all findings are validated by a panel of industry experts.

Results show that non‐legitimate file‐sharing activity is a heterogeneous issue across countries. The scale of activity varies from 14 per cent in Germany to 44 per cent in Spain, with an average of 28 per cent. File‐sharing activity negatively correlates to music industry revenue per capita. This research finds many consumers are not engaging with online business models. Almost one fourth of the population claim that they do not consume digital music in either legal or illegal forms. This phenomenon is also negatively correlated with sales per capita.

Results support the need for policy makers to introduce strong intellectual property rights (IPR) regulation which reduces file‐sharing activity. The work also identifies a large percentage of non‐participants in the digital market who may be re‐engaged with music through business model innovation.

This research presents a map of the current file‐sharing activity in ten countries using a rich and unique dataset. The work identifies that a country's legal origin correlates to data on file‐sharing activity, with countries from a German legal origin illegally file sharing least. Approximately, half of the survey respondents chose not to answer the question related to file‐sharing activity. Different estimates of the true scale of file‐sharing activity are given based upon three different assumptions of the file sharing activity of non‐respondents to this question. The challenge of engaging consumers in the digital market through different business models is discussed in light of digital music's high velocity environment.

To provide an empirically based analysis and evaluation of the existing and possible future evolution of Internet business models within the digital content market, focusing particularly on the possibilities for cooperation and coopetition within this market‐space.

The paper is based on a three‐year study of the European online news and online music sectors, comprising a set of preliminary, scene‐setting case studies of a number of major players within the European online news and music sectors; a detailed, two‐stage survey made up of online questionnaires and face‐to‐face interviews; and a small number of in‐depth case studies.

Provides a discussion of the changes taking place in the online news and music sectors, the evolution of the business models within them, the driving forces we have identified, and finally some predictions about what the future may hold for both these sectors.

The research is indicative, rather than general – being centred on European participants in two sectors of the digital content market‐space in the period between May 2003 and August 2004.

A rich evaluation of these two fast‐moving digital content sectors, providing empirically based insights into the ways in which they are evolving and changing and into parallels with other, similar sectors of the digital content market.

This paper is the first major empirical evaluation of the digital content market‐space and offers practical assistance, as well as new theoretical insights on e‐business model evolution in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the material nature of legacy technology makes its users passionately prefer it over its digital alternatives.

This ethnographic study uses data from 26 in-depth interviews with vinyl collectors, augmented with longitudinal participant–observation of vinyl collecting and music store events.

The findings reveal how the physicality of vinyl facilitates the passionate relationships (with music, the vinyl as performative object and other people) that make vinyl so significant in vinyl users’ lives.

As this study examines a single research context (vinyl) from the perspective of participants from three developed, Anglophone nations, its key theoretical contributions should be examined in other technological contexts and other cultures.

The findings imply that miniturisation and automation have lower limits for some products, material attributes should be added to digitised products and that legacy technology products could be usually be reframed as tools of authentic self-expression.

This study explains what can happen beyond the top of the “S” curve in the Technology Acceptance Model, furthering our understanding of consumers’ reactions to the proliferation of digital technology in their lives.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the auditory-sensory characteristics of the digital pop music that is particularly successful on the YouTube website by measuring young listeners’ brain responses to highly successful pop music noninvasively.

The authors conducted a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiment with 56 young adults (23 females; mean age 24 years) with normal vision and hearing and no record of neurological disease. The authors calculated total blood flow (TBF) and hemodynamic randomness and examined their relationships with online popularity.

The authors found that TBF to the right medial prefrontal cortex increased more when the young adults heard music that presented acoustic stimulation well above previously defined optimal sensory level. The hemodynamic randomness decreased significantly when the participants listened to music that provided near- or above-OSL stimulation.

Online popularity, recorded as the number of daily hits, was significantly positively related with the TBF and negatively related with hemodynamic randomness.

These findings suggest that a new media marketing strategy may be required that can provide a sufficient level of sensory stimulation to Millennials in order to increase their engagements in various use cases including entertainment, advertising and retail environments.

Digital technology has so drastically reduced the costs of sharing and disseminating information, including music, that consumers can now easily use digital platforms to access a wide selection of music at minimal cost. The structure of the current music market reflects the decentralized nature of the online distribution network such that artists from all over the world now have equal access to billions of members of the global music audience.

This study confirms the importance of understanding target customer’s sensory experiences would grow in determining the success of digital contents and marketing.

The Maine Music Box is an interactive, multimedia digital music library that enables users to view images of sheet music, scores and cover art, play back audio and video renditions, and manipulate the arrangement of selected pieces by changing the key and instrumentation. In this pilot project the partners are exploring the feasibility and obstacles of combining collections, digital library infrastructure, and technical and pedagogical expertise from different institutions to implement a digital music library and integrate it into Maine's classrooms. This paper describes the methodology for digitizing, processing and providing access to electronic resources owned by two libraries and hosted by another, and the use of those collections to develop an instructional tool keyed to the digital library.

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

This study investigated the interrelations of US consumers' perceptions of their ownership of digital media content, their perceived importance of various digital rights and ownership rights and their preferences for owning vs accessing media content.

This study used an online questionnaire survey and analyzed data from 437 participants recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk mechanism.

Participants' perceived importance of digital rights correlates with consumers' ownership perceptions, and people who value certain digital rights tend to have narrower ownership perceptions. Users' ownership and access preferences vary with their perceived importance of ownership rights, especially concerning music and movies. Notably, people who prefer the access model were less concerned about ownership rights to possess, use and resell content.

The study provides empirical evidence of consumers' ownership perceptions in the digital age and warns consumers of the dangers of the erosion of their digital ownership rights.

Legal ownership and psychological ownership are usually considered separate constructs and seldom examined together. By showing the correlation between consumers' ownership perceptions and their perceived importance of digital rights, this study demonstrates the connection between legal ownership and psychological ownership.

The aim of this article is to describe the genesis and structural components for an open‐source MusicXML digital library platform.

After briefly discussing music information retrieval within the context of emerging approaches to digital music notation formats, specifically MusicXML, the article discusses how the author's graduate school project evolved into a search and delivery platform for MusicXML files and their manifestations, with particular emphasis on the platform's underlying software structure. A discussion of the platform's end user interface and administrative scripts provides further explanation regarding how the system functions.

Although work remains to be done, digital libraries are poised to use MusicXML and its supporting software for the advancement of music‐related services offered to patrons.

The paper discusses a proof‐of‐concept, open‐source MusicXML digital library platform that may be of interest to librarians with and without musical and/or programming backgrounds.