Digital Business Transformation In The Live Music Industry - A Case Study on Co-Created Business Models for Digital Solutions at Music Festivals

Abstract: New technological possibilities and a changed consumer media behavior have disrupted the media industry's value chain, allowing new players to enter the market as well as shifting the power distribution among existing actors. Given the tremendous speed of this shift, the industry actors constantly face challenges in how to frame these new possibilities regarding joint value creation, as well as how to align their business models to a changed industry logic that doesn't have a linear value chain but demands collaboration and interaction among the involved actors. The purpose of this thesis is therefore both to understand the processes happening in the media industry and also to gain knowledge about how the stakeholders should act and interact to foster the value within their network and how a joint business model among those relevant stakeholders can be shaped. Therefore, within the live music industry, an in-depth case study on the creation of live streaming solutions at music festivals was chosen that serves the criteria of the outlined problem area. In total, 11 interviews have been conducted with industry experts from three countries, who are involved in the creation of live streaming solutions for the world's most known festivals. Thereby, the case provides findings on the stakeholder network characteristics, interactions and interdependencies among the stakeholders as well as on power distributions and how a business model for live streaming solutions is co-created within the stakeholder network. The results of this study show that each stakeholder integrates unique resources into the network through value propositions, which is the foundation for the joint creation of value since the stakeholders depend on each other to enable the live stream solution and therefore also develop value creation opportunities for one another. Further, it is shown that the stakeholders have different intentions and only the Music Rights Owner and the Event Owner have high performative power, which is a potential cause of tensions within the network. Finally, a concept is presented to integrate the analyzed value co-creation aspects into the business model as a tool for researchers as well as managers to analyze value co-creation opportunities within a specific network-centric business model context.