Editorial

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Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0001_ref_055">Williams, 2018</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0001_ref_041">Ralston, 2018</xref>). By applying a moral intensity test (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0001_ref_030">Jones, 1991</xref>) in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire to six music managers based in London (UK), this article interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making.
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University of Westminster & Goldsmiths, University of London

Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

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Active and co-creative audiences are sought, used, tracked and taken for granted in the quest for strong music brands. Fan communities are co-opted to build value for brands and used to foster communication in transmedia marketing campaigns. However, when focusing on audiences and fans’ digital media activities, digital traces and numbers, important questions of motivations, expectations, experiences, morals and power structures are often overlooked. Drawing on a digital ethnographic study and an interdisciplinary perspective, we investigate a fan community of the Swedish artist Robyn, both online and offline. The article contributes to the concepts of fandom and brandom and the notion of value. It also adds to the knowledge about the perspective of fans and fans’ motivations for taking part and co-creating value in a highly commercialised and strategised music market.
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Hang with Me—Exploring Fandom, Brandom, and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

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It is a fact that the past research has explored service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and value co-creation in music marketing (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_010">Choi &amp; Burnes 2013</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_026">Gamble &amp; Gilmorex 2013</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_027">Gamble 2018</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_075">Saragih 2019</xref>), yet a key aspect of S-D logic, namely resource integration, is an unexplored territory and a promising phenomenon of study. A scattering of evidence demonstrates how actors, whether individuals or organisations, in the music industry are making value propositions and providing operand resources to users of platforms (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_072">Poell, Nieborg, &amp; Van Dijck 2019</xref>), which may result in resource integration and commercial success at a quick pace and on a global scale. Using secondary data in an archival research approach (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_098">Welch 2000</xref>), this paper examines TikTok, a rapidly growing platform where users integrate short (e.g., under 15 s) clips of commercial music into user generated video content in which users dance to, lip-sync with, accept social challenges, integrate hashtags and create memes based on musical content. Further, there is a discussion on evidence about how music is being used by actors on TikTok in order to argue that (a) S-D logic (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_092">Vargo &amp; Lusch 2016</xref>) is an insightful perspective through which one is able to understand music marketing; (b) music providers essentially make value propositions with their music that other actors, such as music consumers, can integrate into their lives through platforms like TikTok; (c) changes in technology affect such resource integration and how actors in the music industry can adapt to such change; (d) value-in-social-context (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_ijmbr-2021-0002_ref_020">Edvardsson, Tronvoll, &amp; Gruber 2010</xref>) is a driver of resource integration by users on the platform; and (e) this example of value created by users on TikTok is just one example of the many types of value which guide action and interaction on today’s music platforms. The discussion and analysis is concluded with several implications for research and practice.
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Resource Integration, Value Co-Creation, and Service-dominant Logic in Music Marketing: The Case of the TikTok Platform

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 13 (2024): Issue 1 (April 2024)

Volume 12 (2023): Issue 2 (October 2023)

Volume 12 (2023): Issue 1 (April 2023)

Volume 11 (2022): Issue 2 (October 2022)

Volume 11 (2022): Issue 1 (April 2022)

Volume 10 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 10 (2021): Issue 1 (April 2021)

International Journal of Music Business Research

The International Journal of Music Business Research (IJMBR) as a double-blind reviewed academic journal provides a platform to present articles of merit and to shed light on the current state of the art of music business research. Music business research is a scientific approach at the intersection of economic, artistic, especially musical, cultural, social, legal, technological developments that aims at a better understanding of the creation/production, dissemination/distribution and reception/consumption of the cultural good music. Thus, the IJMBR targets all academics, from students to professors, from around the world and from all disciplines with an interest in research on the music economy.  The journal is published biannual (April &amp; October) in English. The types of contribution include: research and review articles, research notes- and book reviews. The articles have been thoroughly peer reviewed by international specialists and promoted to researchers working in the same field.   With its generous financial support, the Universitetet i Agder/Norway enables the publication of the IJMBR.  There are no charges for authors to publishing articles in the IJMBR   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 