Saunders, Lewis amd Thornhill Essay

Marketing music products together with emerging digital music programs Esmée was working in the music industry like a marketing movie director for a small and successful impartial record labeled for over fifteen years ahead of deciding to examine at university or college.

She had witnessed various changes in the music industry above her career, the most significant of which was the changeover from selling cassettes, vinyl records and Cd albums at price tag to offering digital music online. Your woman had discovered that the music industry had not taken much notice in the potential for marketing and distributing digital music on-line until Shawn Fanning developed his peer-to-peer (P2P) file trading software, Napster, it happened in 1999. While the music industry centered on shutting the service down, Napster started to be even more well-liked by music followers and consumers who were enthusiastic about discovering and sharing new music and creating custom compilations or playlists without having to acquire entire collections.

Early on, Esmée had made the decision that the girl needed to understand why Napster was so popular and consumers and so enthusiastic about showing music online. She chose to download the Napster software and was surprised to find older tracks that were will no longer available at full, previously unreleased recordings, option studio versions and bootleg recordings built at live concerts. Whilst searching for and downloading music, Esmée likewise began to interact with communities targeted around their particular file trading activities.

While the music industry viewed Napster and other P2P file trading applications with deep hunch and dedicated to the issues of piracy and loss of royalties to shut all of them down, her interactions with P2P document traders supplied her with significant information into how the consumer’s romantic relationship to music was changing. P2P document trading applications and other digital music technology represented fresh ‘meanings’ intended for music fans and distinct new stations for music marketing and distribution. As on-line music writing became a lot more popular, Esmée observed that both main and 3rd party record labels continued to struggle with and resist the particular technologies which were fundamentally redefining their sector.

She was puzzled at this time and desired to develop a even more consolidated knowledge of the current state of the music industry and gain complex knowledge of the potential that new solutions had intended for transforming the entire industry. Approaching the end of her studies, Esmée put in many weeks experiencing identifying the focus of her final research project and considering how her own value systems and beliefs were likely to influence on her exploration. She reflected that inside the programme’s Development and Technology Management module, she got learned about the technical and strategic concerns of digital music syndication involving articles creators, performers, record firms and merchants.

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 capability to identify and address the brand new marketing and sociological issues linked to the consumer’s go for new varieties of music ingestion and that record labels would have to re-evaluate their very own current practices in the context of these new technologies and channels pertaining to music marketing and distribution. Additionally , while examining for the Leadership and Organisational Managing module, the girl had encounter Lawrence and Phillips’ (2002) article within the cultural industries in which that they observed that despite the cultural, economic and political significance of the ethnical industries, administration research experienced neglected to focus their work on ethnic production.

They argued that there was a need for empirical research into the organisational and managerial characteristics of ethnical production and had found that even  where it had been researched, many management researchers experienced failed to prefer the particular nuances and dynamics that characterise these industries. Esmée arranged a meeting with her director and layed out her realization that ‘managing’ in the ethnical industries related less to producing products and more to, managing and maintaining this is or ‘symbolic aspect’ in the product.

She explained to him that this was especially strongly related the music industry’s transition to digital music technologies and that her final task would give attention to how traditional marketing departments in record labels may approach defining their symbole of ‘music products’ when adapting to emerging digital music syndication channels. This may entail understanding how the process of mark creation plus the management of meaning by record labeling would need to be managed to be able to adapt to the emergence of new symbols and potential meanings enabled by the development of new digital music technologies. She added that her experience as a marketing director provided her with unique information that would notify and guide her research.

Her guitar tutor responded by simply commenting that her study sounded interesting and relevant and that, in his opinion, the best way forward would be to adopt a positivist exploration philosophy using a survey approach and applying a questionnaire to marketing personnel across major and independent record labels in order to produce data suitable for record analysis. Following the meeting, Esmée reflected onto her tutor’s feedback. She was surprised that he proposed adopting a positivist viewpoint. Based on her previous experience with peer-to-peer communities, she believed that adopting an interpretivist philosophical stance and using unstructured interviews would be more suitable on her research project.

Esmée contemplated how she should certainly communicate this kind of to her guitar tutor and how she would be able to encourage him that approaching her research project while an interpretivist and applying unstructured selection interviews would be preferable and just as rigorous an undertaking. Referrals Lawrence, Capital t. and Phillips, N. (2002) ‘Understanding cultural industries’, Diary of Administration Inquiry 11: 4, 430–41. Premkumar, G. (2003) ‘Alternate distribution methods for digital music’, Communications with the ACM 46: 9, 89–95. Questions 1 Why is it essential to consider epistemology and ontology when undertaking research?

2 What will Esmée need to do to be able to respond or perhaps challenge her tutor’s assertion that she adopt a quantitative methodology? 3 How exactly does Esmée be familiar with role that her values play with view to her research study?