Music Aggregators and Intermediation of the Digital Music Market

This article demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the advent of the Internet has not made intermediaries in the music market obsolete. Individual artists and independent record labels who want to sell their music in digital music stores must deliver their records via third-party companies called music aggregators. Drawing on the concepts of new institutional economics, the article demonstrates that the emergence of music aggregators is a market response to the high level of transaction costs and bargaining asymmetry associated with selling digital music online. The conclusion suggests that the major music conglomerates may seek ownership links with music aggregators, leading to the emergence of vertically integrated companies, which may have profound consequences for cultural markets

Netlabels and democratization of the recording industry

Netlabels are platforms for online distribution and promotion of music released for free under Creative Commons or similar licenses. They are part of the free music scene, which has been developing dynamically since the advent of the Internet and digitalization. The article employs the concept of democratization to analyze the emergence of netlabels and their impact on the dissemination of music. This paper shows that although the democratizing potential of new technologies is to a certain extent disappointing, grassroots free music movements, such as netlabels, spontaneously build institutions that fulfill focusing and filtering functions to help artists and listeners find what they are looking for in the hyper-abundant musical marketplace

The rise of fanvestors: A study of a crowdfunding community

Crowdfunding is an online collective action initiated by people or institutions to gather funds from a large number of contributors, usually using mediation of crowdfunding platforms to facilitate contact and flow of resources between parties. The success of Kickstarter and similar services shows that crowdfunding has great potential. This paper presents an empirical study of the crowdfunding phenomenon. It analyzes the motivation of individuals involved in supporting recording artists with voluntary payments in exchange for equity stakes. Specifically, the paper focuses on the motives driving individuals who use MegaTotal (http://www.megatotal.pl), a Polish crowdfunding platform, to contribute financial resources to selected musical projects. The analysis leads to the conclusion that individuals involved in crowdfunding are partly driven by motivation that has not been typical of fans in the history of popular music