Abstract
•Digitisation in music and other cultural industries in China has followed a trajectory strikingly different to the West•A liberal environment initially allowed many players to enter the market and offer a wide array of digital music services•As licensing requirements were more strictly enforced internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent: BAT) became dominant.•Diverse services and value propositions can be simultaneously exploited through•BAT's cross-sector platform infrastructures China has been a laboratory for new kinds of innovation in digital music and other services that may be relevant elsewhere
Highlights
Digital technology with its near zero copying and transmission costs has disrupted value chains based upon the trading of music and other cultural products stored on physical media such as records or compact disks (CDs)
We explore the relevance of these perspectives to this multi-centric study of the opening moves in the evolution of China's digital music ecology
The findings presented here arose from an investigation: Convergence or differentiation in intellectual property (IP) protection? A case study of new models for digital film, music and e-fiction production and distribution in China, funded by the AHRC China Digital Copyright Centre, the Newton Fund and the RCUK Research Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe)
Summary
Digital technology with its near zero copying and (since the internet) transmission costs has disrupted value chains based upon the trading of music and other cultural products stored on physical media such as records or compact disks (CDs). A 2014 Special Issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, examined these processes of “disassembly” and “reassembly” of business and service models (Mangematin et al, 2014: 2). It highlighted the efforts of entrenched industry players in the West to reassert their control over the sector (Blanc and Huault, 2014; Dobusch and Schüßler, 2014), an observation confirmed by later work (Rogers and Preston, 2016; Sun, 2016). The rapid proliferation of a wide-range of online services in music, film, literature and beyond is driving radical reconfiguration of business and service models and paving the way for a resurgence in its cultural industries. Exploiting, through takeover and emulation, the flowering of start-up digital music platforms and services, BAT has launched a huge range of free and lowpriced services
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