Digital Music Production Research Articles

“La guerra del volumen”: música y escucha en la era digital

El artículo plantea cuestiones relativas a la producción de música digital, la escucha y el poder a partir del fenómeno conocido como “la guerra del volumen” (the loudness war), una tendencia general de la industria musical a elevar el volumen de los discos en detrimento de la gama dinámica, la libertad de los artistas y la propia libertad de escucha de los oyentes.

The price of quality in digital information goods: an empirical investigation

The popularity of consumer digital information goods is disrupting incumbent firms’ business models, which must seek new sources of profitability. One critical factor is quality standards of distribution formats. Do higher-quality versions command price premiums, and if so, how large? Conversely, do lower-quality versions exhibit price discounts? How much will consumers with differing musical preferences pay for these different quality standards? This study examines prices of digital music products offered at multiple quality levels, finding that strategies of quality versioning have potential to produce profits by segmenting consumer markets to address differing quality preferences both within and across product genres.

The future of digital music sales among web-enabled professionals: an empirical investigation

Typically, artists and recording companies sell their music to distributors or retail stores. Digital music offers them the opportunity to change their strategies and compete directly against retailers. The basic premise of this research is that there are Customer Relations Management (CRM) implications of digital music and how it affects the future of the record industry. A stratified sample of employed professional, web-enabled representatives of the service industry (mainly financial and customer services) located in the metropolitan section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania resulted in 200 useable questionnaires from an initial sampling frame of over 300. From an analyses derived from multiple regression and exploratory factor techniques, it has that a number of variables could discriminate the importance of the price of piracy as a dependent variable factor-based construct. The Shared Usage and Convenience construct was found to be highly significant and positively related to the price of piracy, while significant and inversely related to the price of piracy were the Content Issues, Technology Usage, and Online Music Buying constructs, since they are the very reasons why many customers turn to legitimate sources of digital music products and services. A number of specific recommendations were made to management based on the results.