Crowdsourcing For Innovation In The Music Industry
Crowdsourcing is a concept that has been heavily used in the business research area, but there has been exploration in a small scale on music business level. Crowdsourcing should be more than crowfunding for the recording of a new album or the implementation of a tour. Music business is an area that consists of several business activities, however “new product” is not a priority for labels right now because most of them capitalize on the old catalogue earnings instead of releasing new material.
Image 1. Crowdsourcing stages
Crowdsourcing for innovation in the music industry could be an exploration of ideas for new business processes or improvement of the existing business processes. Managerially thinking, business processes is a set of processes that affect the financial status of the entity (label, artist) but they could be viewed from a managerial, legal or even accounting perspective. For instance, the following diagram depicts the process of paying the royalties from PRS For Music’s side. The reduction of time for completion for each stage is an important issue because the flow of money will be faster which in turn would boost the generation of new financial resources for new music projects.
Image 2. PRS For Music royalties payment process (click on the image for more info)
A potential crowdsourcing for innovation campaign may assign a task to the music business stakeholders (musicians, managers, labels, etc.) to improve or reduce each stage of reporting on time of completion level. The PRS executives may offer a short description of each accounting step and run a crowdsourcing micro website on their main website that will act as a platform for crowsourcing.
The motivation for the potential contributors could be intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on the assigned task and the expertise of the participants. There are several factors that affect the motivation of the stakeholders to participate in the crowdsourcing activity. Personally, I am conducting research on the behavioral characteristics that affect the willingness to participate in the crowdsourcing for innovation. If you have any business or academic interest in this area, I would love to discuss it with you.
Vasileios Yfantis
E-mail: Byfantis@yahoo.com
Images License (Cover image, Image 1.): Creative Commons
Image 2 Source: http://www.prsformusic.com
