The music industry in the digital age How is consumer behavior changing in regard to music purchasing and how to make the music industry profitable again

Details

Supervisors

Vas, Alain

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Recently, over the last two decades, humanity witnessed the advent of new technologies that profoundly shaped many aspects of their daily lives. Like in many industries, these technologies also had massive impact on the music industry in several ways. Indeed, they drastically changed the way consumers consume music. Thus, companies in the recording industry had to change the way they distribute music: whereas physical sales (CD’s) reached their peak by the end of the 1990’s, their numbers have collapsed over the last decade, leaving space to digital sales and the unwanted consequence of piracy (or illegal downloading). Piracy is a real problem for copyright holders and music creators as their craft is being stolen massively by music consumers and don’t get paid for their work. Tones of papers have been written about it to find a solution to this problem. As I was making research, I had the opportunity to have deeper knowledge on the subject. How I want to contribute to this topic is by bringing solutions from a business perspective. Indeed, the vast majority of the papers are written to solve the problem from a legal perspective (cf. copyright infringement). For the sake of our research, different common hypothesis about music consumption in the digital era were verified. These hypotheses enabled us to give recommendation to music businesses. Hopefully, we can help them tackle the problem of illegal downloading by using a business approach.