The Effects of Digital Music Distribution

The research paper was a study of how digital music distribution has affected the music industry by researching different views and aspects. I believe this topic was vital to research because it give us insight on were the music industry is headed in the future. Two main research questions proposed were; “How is digital music distribution affecting the music industry?” and “In what way does the piracy industry affect the digital music industry?” The methodology used for this research was performing case studies, researching prospective and retrospective data, and analyzing sales figures and graphs. Case studies were performed on one independent artist and two major artists whom changed the digital music industry in different ways. Another pair of case studies were performed on an independent label and a major label on how changes of the digital music industry effected their business model and how piracy effected those new business models as well. I analyzed sales figures and graphs of digital music sales and physical sales to show the differences in the formats. I researched prospective data on how consumers adjusted to the digital music advancements and how piracy industry has affected them. Last I concluded all the data found during this research to show that digital music distribution is growing and could possibly be the dominant format for obtaining music, and the battle with piracy will be an ongoing process that will be hard to end anytime soon

The Effects of Online Incentivized Reviews on Organic Review Ratings

As online reviews become a major factor in the consumer decision-making process, firms have started seeking ways to create and leverage reviews to help achieve their marketing objectives. One productive strategy to generate reviews is to incentivize or reward customers to write reviews. While such a strategy certainly augments the number of reviews, it naturally raises questions of how unbiased such reviews are, and how such a bias, if it exists, affects potential customers. Complicating the issue further, such incentives can be provided by either the vendor or the platform, which may affect the nature of bias. To understand the marketing value of such reviews, this research examines the effects of online incentivized reviews on subsequent organic reviews. First, we investigate whether incentivized reviews are biased compared to organic reviews. Specifically, we find that vendor – initiated incentivized reviews are more favorable whereas platform – initiated incentivized reviews are more critical. Second, we study how incentivized reviews affect future organic review ratings. The findings suggest that vendor (platform) – initiated incentivized reviews reduce (increase) the subsequent organic review ratings. Moderating effects of helpfulness of incentivized reviews and product type are significant. These findings offer important insights about the effectiveness of incentivized reviews

Perceived derived attributes of online customer reviews

The influence of online customer reviews (OCRs) on customers' purchase intention has recently gained considerable attention, in both academic and business communities. Technology allows customers to freely and easily post their comments and opinions online about any product or service; this type of customer review can have a significant effect on customers' purchase decisions. Previous studies, however, have mainly focused on the influence of the virtual attributes of OCRs such as volume and valence on consumers' intentions, while limited attention has been paid to understanding the effects of the derived attributes. This study, thus, aims to understand the impact of the perceived derived attributes of OCRs on customer trust and intention. This study develops a – Perceived Derived Attributes (PDA) - model, based on the inclusion of perceived control from the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), in order to investigate the effects of OCRs on customers’ purchasing intention. A total of 489 responses to a survey were collected from users of amazon.com. The findings from this study suggest that customer trust in an e-vendor and their intention to shop online are significantly affected by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived enjoyment of OCRs. Furthermore, the sense of control derived from OCRs significantly affects customer intention and significantly affects customer trust in e-vendors, particularly for customers who frequently check OCRs before making a purchase. Clearly, those attributes of OCRs are linked to the development of the shopping environment, which consequently can affect sales

The impact of online customer reviews (OCRs) on customers' purchase decisions: An exploration of the main dimensions of OCRs

Online customer reviews (OCRs) have become a primary source of product information and an important influence on customers’ purchase decision. This has resulted in a significant impact on consumer purchase decision making. The effects of OCRs on consumer behaviour have recently gained significant academic attention. Therefore, there is a need to provide a review on such effects. This paper, thus, examines the latest understandings in the links and relationships between OCRs and customers’ purchase intention. It reviews the main dimensions of the OCRs and how they affect customers’ purchase intention. It also addresses the issues of credibilities, roles, antecedents, helpfulness, measures and consequences of OCRs. In addition, a case study has been provided in which OCRs are analysed for a better understanding of the relationship between OCRs and consumer’s purchase intention

Perceived Derived Attributes of Online Customer Reviews

The influence of online customer reviews (OCRs) on customers' purchase intention has recently gained considerable attention, in both academic and business communities. Technology allows customers to freely and easily post their comments and opinions online about any product or service; this type of customer review can have a significant effect on customers' purchase decisions. Previous studies, however, have mainly focused on the influence of the virtual attributes of OCRs such as volume and valence on consumers' intentions, while limited attention has been paid to understanding the effects of the derived attributes. This study, thus, aims to understand the impact of the perceived derived attributes of OCRs on customer trust and intention. This study develops a – Perceived Derived Attributes (PDA) - model, based on the inclusion of perceived control from the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), in order to investigate the effects of OCRs on customers’ purchasing intention. A total of 489 responses to a survey were collected from users of amazon.com. The findings from this study suggest that customer trust in an e-vendor and their intention to shop online are significantly affected by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived enjoyment of OCRs. Furthermore, the sense of control derived from OCRs significantly affects customer intention and significantly affects customer trust in e-vendors, particularly for customers who frequently check OCRs before making a purchase. Clearly, those attributes of OCRs are linked to the development of the shopping environment, which consequently can affect sales

Does Sampling Influence Customers in Online Retailing of Digital Music?

Online retailers have taken recourse to many smart marketing strategies to sell digital music. This paper investigates the strategic decisions of online vendors for offering different mechanisms such as sampling and online reviews of digital music to increase their online sales. In this research we seek answers to the following research questions (1) should online retailers offer sampling for experience goods such as music CDs; (2) under what circumstances is offering sampling more important than offering reviews. Our empirical study shows that online markets behave as communication markets, and consumers learn about product quality information both passively (by reading online reviews) and actively but subjectively (by listening to music sampling). Using data from Amazon.com, we empirically show that sampling is a strong product quality signal that reduces product uncertainty and attracts interested shoppers. Products with the sampling option enjoy a higher conversion rate (which leads to better sales) than those without it. Second, the impact of online reviews on conversion rate is lower for experience goods with a sampling option than those without. Third, when the uncertainty of the online reviews is higher, sampling plays a more important role because it mitigates the uncertainty introduced by online reviews. We believe this paper makes an important contribution by comparing and studying the interactions between two commonly adopted online marketing strategies (i. e., sampling versus online reviews) and provides important insights on which strategy is beneficial for vendors in the context of online selling of digital music. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Reaching for the stars: consumers’ interpretations of online rating distributions and their validity as an indicator of product quality

Over the past two decades, rapid advances in technology and the omnipresence of the Internet have led to a fundamental change in our shopping behavior. While purchase behavior in traditional bricks-and-mortar stores is constricted by, for instance, limited retail spaces and finite opening hours, the Internet enables customers to shop anything, anytime, and anywhere. Moreover, while in the past, consumers were reliant on the quality of sales people’s advice or recommendations from their friends, they can now share their experiences and opinions about products, services, companies, and brands on a variety of websites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Google with anyone. Investigating consumer reviews on an aggregate level, a great deal of literature is centered toward consumers’ response to different characteristics describing the distribution of rating scores, including, for instance, average product ratings, the dispersion of rating scores, and rating volume. However, despite the abundance of research on consumers’ reactions to different characteristics of rating distributions our knowledge of the effects caused by further distribution features (e.g., mode, median, skewness, etc.) is still limited. Adding to this stream of literature, the first empirical research paper presented in this thesis demonstrates a tendency to use the mode as a heuristic basis when making product inferences from online rating distributions in such a way that product evaluations inferred from rating distributions with an equal average, standard deviation, and number of ratings systematically vary by the location of the mode; a phenomenon referred to as the mode heuristic. The results of a series of six studies, using a mix of experimental and real-world data, (1) provide strong empirical evidence for the existence of the mode heuristic in a variety of different contexts, (2) shed light on this phenomenon at the process level, and (3) demonstrate how product inferences based on the mode heuristic depend on the visual salience of the mode. Furthermore, several researchers have questioned whether the proliferation of online consumer reviews should be considered a positive development from a consumer welfare perspective by investigating if the evaluations posted online can actually reflect the ‘true’ quality of a product. In this vein, de Langhe et al. (2016a) reported a substantial gap between the extent to which consumers trust in average ratings when making inferences about the quality of a product and the actual validity of such ratings as an indicator of a product’s ‘objective’ performance. The second research paper presented in this doctoral dissertation replicates and extends this finding by examining how the convergence between objective and rated quality alters over the product life cycle and investigating which quality indicator is a better predictor of sales performance. Overall, this doctoral dissertation contributes to a better understanding of consumers’ use of online reviews in purchase decision making and offers highly relevant implications for theory and practice