Editorial

The October 2022 issue of the International Journal of Management and Business Research (IJMBR) covers three different topics ranging from the economic role of showcase festivals to music publishers’ relationships with collecting societies and the innovativeness of the Jamaican reggae music industry.

The first article, ‘Showcase Festivals: Gatekeepers and Bridge Builders in the Music Industries’ by Kjersti Livesdottir Thorkildsen and Anders Rykkja of the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, highlights the crucial role of showcase festivals in the music industry as a highly relevant link between artists and their management to live music promoters, records labels and other industry stakeholders. By using gatekeeping, fields and capital theories, the authors exemplify the showcase festivals’ economic relevance in an empirical field study on the Nordic showcase festival ‘by: Larm’.

Mihail Miller and Stephan Klingner of the Institute for Applied Informatics of the University of Leipzig's Computing Centre (URZ) investigate – in their article ‘Reframing the Economic Rationale of Music Publishers’ Relationships with Rights Management Entities’ – the growing complexity of the relationship between music publishers and collecting societies, as well as new forms of rights management companies. The authors highlight the impact of European Union (EU) copyright and rights management legislation on the music publishing market and propose a unified model for Rights Management Entities’ (RMEs) Relationship Management for music publishers to cope with the current challenges.

In the third article of the October 2022 issue, Nadia Whiteman, who is a consulting strategist of Limners and Bards Ltd in Jamaica, presents the results of a field study on the Jamaican reggae music industry. In her article entitled ‘The Hustla Playbook: Negotiating the Business Politics of Reggae in the Jamaican Rock Music Scene’, she analyses the unstable and precarious job market for reggae artists in Jamaica but, nevertheless, comes to the conclusion that despite all disadvantages, the Jamaican rock scene is highly innovative and, by merging rock music with reggae, it has facilitated the revival of contemporary reggae.

The October 2022 issue concludes with a book review by Erik Hitters on ‘Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries’ by Richard Osborne and Dave Laing.

The IJMBR is aimed at all academics around the world, from students to professors, from all disciplines and with an interest in music business research. Interdisciplinary papers will be especially welcome if they address economic and business-related topics in the field of music. We look forward to receiving as many interesting papers as possible. Please submit your articles at the journal's webpage: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ijmbr/default1.aspx.