Case 4a: Marketing music products alongside emerging digital music

channels
Dr Rick Colbourne, Simon Fraser University
Esmée had been working in the music industry as a Marketing Director for a small and
successful independent record label for over fifteen years before deciding to study at University.
She had witnessed many changes in the music industry over her career, the most significant of
which was the transition from selling cassettes, vinyl records and CDs at retail to selling digital
music online. She had observed that the music industry had not taken much notice of the
potential for marketing and distributing digital music online until Shawn Fanning developed his
peer-to-peer (P2P) file trading application, Napster, in 1999. While the music industry focused
on shutting the service down, Napster became even more popular with music fans and
consumers who were interested in discovering and sharing new music and creating custom
compilations or playlists without having to buy entire albums. Early on, Esmée had decided that
she needed to understand why Napster was so popular and consumers so enthusiastic about
sharing music online. She decided to download the Napster application and was surprised to
find older songs that were no longer available at retail, previously unreleased recordings,
alternative studio versions and bootleg recordings made at live concerts. While searching for
and downloading music, Esmée also began to interact with communities focused around their
file trading activities. While the music industry viewed Napster and other P2P file trading
applications with deep suspicion and focused on the issues of piracy and loss of royalties to
shut them down, her interactions with P2P file traders provided her with significant insights into
how the consumer’s relationship to music was changing. P2P file trading applications and other
digital music technologies represented new ‘meanings’ for music fans and distinct new channels
for music marketing and distribution. As online music sharing became even more popular,
Esmée observed that both major and independent record labels continued to struggle with and
resist the very technologies that were fundamentally redefining their industry. She was puzzled
by this and wanted to develop a more consolidated understanding of the current state of the
music industry and to gain in-depth knowledge of the potential that new technologies had for
transforming the entire industry.
Nearing the end of her studies, Esmée spent many weeks struggling with identifying the focus of
her final research project and thinking about how her own value systems and beliefs were likely
to impact on her research. She reflected that in the programme’s Innovation and Technology
Management module, she had learned about the technical and strategic issues of digital music
distribution involving content creators, artists, record companies and retailers. After reading
Premkumar’s (2003) article Alternate Distribution Strategies for Digital Music, Esmée realised
that success in digital music distribution hinged on the music industry’s ability to identify and
address the new marketing and sociological issues associated with the consumer’s switch to
new forms of music consumption and that record labels would need to re-evaluate their current
practices in context of these new technologies and channels for music marketing and
distribution. Additionally, while reading for the Leadership and Organisational Management
module, she had come across Lawrence and Phillips’ (2002) article on the cultural industries in
which they observed that despite the social, economic and political significance of the cultural
industries, management research had neglected to focus their efforts on cultural production.
They argued that there was a need for empirical research into the organisational and
managerial dynamics of cultural production and had found that even where it had been studied,
many
management researchers had failed to appreciate the particular nuances and dynamics that
characterise these industries.
Esmée arranged a meeting with her supervisor and outlined her realisation that ‘managing’ in
the cultural industries related less to producing products and more to creating, managing and
maintaining the meaning or ‘symbolic aspect’ of the product. She explained to him that this was
especially relevant to the music industry’s transition to digital music technologies and that her
final project would focus on how traditional marketing departments in record labels could
approach redefining their notions of ‘music products’ while adapting to emerging digital music
distribution channels. This would entail understanding how the process of symbol creation and
the management of meaning by record labels would need to be managed in order to adapt to
the emergence of new symbols and potential meanings enabled by the development of new
digital music technologies. She added that her experiences as a Marketing Director provided
her with unique insights that would inform and guide her research. Her tutor responded by
commenting that her research project sounded interesting and relevant and that, in his opinion,
the best way forward would be to adopt a positivist research philosophy using a survey strategy
and administering a questionnaire to marketing personnel across major and independent record
labels in order to produce data suitable for statistical analysis. After the meeting, Esmée
reflected on her tutor’s comments. She was surprised that he proposed adopting a positivist
philosophy. Based on her previous experiences with peer-to-peer communities, she believed
that adopting an interpretivist philosophical stance and using unstructured interviews would be
more suitable for her research project. Esmée contemplated how she should communicate this
to her tutor and how she would be able to convince him that approaching her research project
as an interpretivist and using unstructured interviews would be preferable and just as rigorous
an undertaking .
Questions
1. Why is it important to consider epistemology and ontology when undertaking research?

2. What will Esmée need to do in order to respond or challenge her tutor’s assertion that she
adopt a quantitative methodology?

3. How does Esmée understand the role that her values play with regard to her research
project?

References and further reading

Alvesson, M. & Sköldberg, K. (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative
Research, London: Sage Publications.
Johnson, P. & Duberly, J. (2000) Understanding Management Research: An Introduction to
Epistemology, London: Sage Publications.
Johnson, P. & Duberly, J. (2003) Reflexivity in Management Research. Journal of Management
Studies, 40, 5, pp. 1279–1303.
Lawrence, T. B. & Phillips, N. (2002) Understanding Cultural Industries. Journal of Management
Inquiry, 11, 4, pp. 430–441.
Premkumar, G. P. (2003) Alternate Distribution Strategies for Digital Music. Communications of the
ACM, 46, 9, pp. 89–95.