Abstract
Digital music streaming are climbing but overall music revenue is declining with digital music piracy being blamed as the culprit. In a 10 year period from 2003 to 2013, global music sales dropped from $US23.3 to $US15 billion dollars with Thailand’s music industry following the trend dropping from $US 304 million in 2010 to $US 279 million in 2014. The study therefore used a structural equation model to analyze the variables affecting digital music piracy and fan music streaming's purchase intention. From the seven point Likert scale questionnaire, 350 music fans were surveyed concerning their digital music streaming activities. The qualitative research was conducted with 10 executives in music industry by the use of purposive sampling. Partial Least Square Graph software was used for model verification with the results showing that fan idolatry has the highest influence on the overall decision to stream music digitally. The results showed that the results of quantitative research is practical and acceptable hypothesis significance at p ≤ 0.05 by factors that have a direct influence positive peak and overall influence is the highest passion to affect their willingness to stream music digitally to consumers. The findings of this study concluded that the artist's passion for their music fans is the key factor in music lover’s intent to stream and pay for digital music. Fans are ultimately the most important sector of the industry and unfortunately it is one which the industry forgets about. Labels or artists who focus on only ‘looking good’ while not engaging their fan audiences are destined for a continuing decline in their sales numbers.
Highlights
Music recording has had a long history of technological evolution which most agree began on December 7, 1877, when Thomas Edison demonstrated his cylinder phonograph at the office of Scientific American in New York City (Edison Paper, 2013)
Idolatry refers to psychological identification and an emotional attachment to an idol figure, which is probably a celebrity (Cheung & Yue, 2012) whose attachment is greatest with younger children, decreasing in intensity with age with females idolizing singers more than males (Raviv, Bar-Tal, Raviv, & Ben-Horin, 1996)
Subjective Norms consists of two empirical observations or variables including normative belief and social pressure
Summary
Music recording has had a long history of technological evolution which most agree began on December 7, 1877, when Thomas Edison demonstrated his cylinder phonograph at the office of Scientific American in New York City (Edison Paper, 2013). Technological leaps have been many, one of the first that left a long legacy was the use of ‘Vitrolac’ which allowed the placing of finer grooves in a record this increasing listening times to 30 minutes. This form of LP recording (long playing) is still used today and was a true milestone in recording history (“New phonograph record”, 1932). It was Sony which revolutionized the consumer recording industry with the ‘Sony cassette recorder’ in 1966 (Nunnally, 1978). It was Napster that was the forerunner of today’s streaming services such as iTunes Radio and the world’s largest streaming music service, Spotify (Ingham, 2016)
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