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

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 (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991) 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.

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.

It is a fact that the past research has explored service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and value co-creation in music marketing (Choi & Burnes 2013; Gamble & Gilmorex 2013; Gamble 2018; Saragih 2019), 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 (Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019), 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 (Welch 2000), 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 (Vargo & Lusch 2016) 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 (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber 2010) 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.