Successful Digital Marketing Strategies of Independent Artists

A lack of effective digital marketing strategies can hinder profitability for independent artists. Artists who cannot develop digital marketing strategies are at risk of not sustaining their independent businesses. Based on the foundational principle of marketing mix as its conceptual lens, the purpose of this qualitative, exploratory multiple case study was to explore what digital marketing strategies some independent artists used to achieve and sustain profitability. The participants were nine independent artists on the east coast of the United States who published original music at a profit during the last 5 years. Data were collected from semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-step interpretive analyses. Three themes emerged: primary digital marketing strategies, marketing analysis tools, and key barriers to sustaining profitability. The key recommendation is for independent music artists to implement technological advances to support the digital marketing of their music. The implication for positive social change includes the potential for independent music artists to contribute knowledge to support and encourage fellow artists to continue composing music

Successful Digital Marketing Strategies of Independent Artists

A lack of effective digital marketing strategies can hinder profitability for independent artists. Artists who cannot develop digital marketing strategies are at risk of not sustaining their independent businesses. Based on the foundational principle of marketing mix as its conceptual lens, the purpose of this qualitative, exploratory multiple case study was to explore what digital marketing strategies some independent artists used to achieve and sustain profitability. The participants were nine independent artists on the east coast of the United States who published original music at a profit during the last 5 years. Data were collected from semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-step interpretive analyses. Three themes emerged: primary digital marketing strategies, marketing analysis tools, and key barriers to sustaining profitability. The key recommendation is for independent music artists to implement technological advances to support the digital marketing of their music. The implication for positive social change includes the potential for independent music artists to contribute knowledge to support and encourage fellow artists to continue composing music

Voluntary Payments in Music: The Future of Creative Economies?

Voluntary payment platforms, such as Bandcamp and Patreon, arenotable because they challenge both the traditional music industry model, inwhich fans must pay for music in order to obtain access to it, and theassumption within classical economics that humans are purely self-interested,rational actors. Here, fan behavior on Bandcamp is analyzed in three studies:a quantitative comparison of Bandcamp and non-Bandcamp users, a qualitative and quantitative examination of how Bandcamp users assign valueto music and artists, and a quantitative analysis of Bandcamp transactions.Through this, we gain an understanding of Bandcamp users’ motivations forusing the platform to support artists as well as the factors that drive differentlevels of financial support. Furthermore, we establish the potential for voluntarypayments to scale to more artists and fans, as well as the limitations to scaling,if they were to be adopted more widely by the music industry and integratedinto the streaming ecosystem

Orchestrating the Ecosystem: How Music Making is Transformed in the Digital Age

This thesis aims to understand how digitalisation transforms musical production. Following a process of theory retroduction, this investigation draws upon and contributes to management literature in accounting for and explaining recent changes in practices of music making. Principally autoethnographic, this study pragmatically fuses personal experiences of being an active musician and consistent band member for over a decade with an ethnography built from pragmatic applications of netnography and semi-structured ethnographic interviews. An initial round of grounded theory analysis found that digitalisation has empowered musicians and helped constitute a hypercompetitive marketplace. The effect of this is that musicians are despondent, awash in a sea of uncertainty and unable to grasp hold of their digital futures. In seeking means of understanding these impacts, the process of retroduction takes us to the field of digital entrepreneurship, where a digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship considers the affordance of entrepreneurial ecosystems, representing a valuable addition to this investigation's initial cultural entrepreneurship framing. Once again, however, the data suggests limitations in the core assumptions of digital entrepreneurship and instead formulates a critical theory of the digital which deepens our understanding of digitalisation. Data shows musicians in the digital age are experiencing alienation supercharged by the formal rationality which underpins the logic of digital and computational technologies. The conceptual refinement achieved in this study culminates with a final turn to the field of Information Systems, operationalising fresh insights such as digital object theories and the idea that digitalisation results in processes of ontological reversal in developing a digital-first framing. Reinterpreting the data using the properties of digital objects (embeddedness, interactivity, malleability and sociomateriality), this research produces a novel means of exploring and re-theorising digitalisation contributing a digital technology perspective of cultural entrepreneurship, a renewal of the digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship (more broadly) by drawing upon the latest insights from Information Systems as well as suggesting critical theory as an approach that deepens our understanding of digitalisation, lacking in most mainstream management accounts. The final contribution of this thesis is a novel empirical-ethnographic account of music making within a contemporary digital milieu

A manifesto for the creative economy

The UK\u27s creative economy is one of its great national strengths, historically deeply rooted and accounting for around one-tenth of the whole economy. It provides jobs for 2.5 million people – more than in financial services, advanced manufacturing or construction – and in recent years, this creative workforce has grown four times faster than the workforce as a whole. But behind this success lies much disruption and business uncertainty, associated with digital technologies. Previously profitable business models have been swept away, young companies from outside the UK have dominated new internet markets, and some UK creative businesses have struggled to compete. UK policymakers too have failed to keep pace with developments in North America and parts of Asia. But it is not too late to refresh tired policies. This manifesto sets out our 10-point plan to bolster one of the UK\u27s fastest growing sectors

Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain: an empirical assessment

This Report is the outcome of a knowledge exchange scheme which brings together academics (from the disciplines of law, media & communication studies, management and economics), policy makers from the Intellectual Property Office (an executive agency of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) and media businesses (in particular transmedia SMEs) to generate and disseminate new knowledge about the use of public domain works

A Set Theoretical Approach to Maturity Models: Guidelines and Demonstration

Maturity Model research in IS has been criticized for the lack of theoretical grounding, methodological rigor, empirical validations, and ignorance of multiple and non-linear paths to maturity. To address these criticisms, this paper proposes a novel set-theoretical approach to maturity models characterized by equifinality, multiple conjunctural causation, and case diversity. We prescribe methodological guidelines consisting of a six-step procedure to systematically apply set theoretic methods to conceptualize, develop, and empirically derive maturity models and provide a demonstration of it application on a social media maturity data-set. Specifically, we employ Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) to identify maturity stage boundaries as necessary conditions and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to arrive at multiple configurations that can be equally effective in progressing to higher maturity

Advances in Crowdfunding: Research and Practice

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