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

Authors: Alan D. Smith

Addresses: Department of Management and Marketing, Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, PA 15219–3099, USA

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: customer relations management; CRM; digital rights management; DRM; empirical; digital music; personal health information; Recording Industry Association of America; RIAA; record industry; price of piracy; music piracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2009.024096

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2009 Vol.4 No.3, pp.263 - 289

Published online: 25 Mar 2009 *

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