AbstractsComputer Science

Through out the ages, humans have devoted themselves to musical expression. For many peoplemusic is a daily ingredient, and for some it is an important part of having a prosperous life.During the latest years we have seen a change, a movement, within the music industry. In connection with an increasing digital evolution, the physical music industry got affected to evolve and move into the digital space. In the digital realms new services and features are presented daily to satisfy music listeners, which has opened up a huge source of music that no longer is limited by physical record shelves located in a physical record store. Despite this, themusic industry has struggled with creating a willingness to pay for digital material, which is often argued to be due to a missing sense of value of ownership when purchasing digital media.This thesis aims to examine how the physical values can be converted into the digital world, to cater to consumers, and thus to increase the willingness to pay for digitally distributed music.The purpose of this thesis is:“Digitalisation within the music industry – How can experienced physical market values be To investigate this purpose, three different methods of research were conducted. Interviews were made with people involved with the music industry, to hear about their personal opinion and forecasts of the digital music market. To gather insight from an audience angle a focus group was conducted, supplemented with a survey that was sent out to people associated to music oriented network. To build a foundation of necessary information and to understand the music industry, literature studies were made on the current market situation and also about different companies, representing different distribution models available on the market. The investigation proved that as a consumer of digital distributed music it is possible to notice certain behaviour and goals with consuming music online. Also, there seems to be a positive evolution for the streaming based services, since streaming offers access and possibility to navigate towards new music in an effective way. What is also clear, according to investigation, is the difficulty to transform a previous strong physical market into the more fluid and open digital space.We are currently in the starting blocks of the digital evolution, and the all the opportunities offered has not yet been discovered or applied. The proposals presented in this thesis are general forecasts of how the music industry might evolve in the nearest future, and what benefits and obstacles that way occur while adapting to new digital preconditions.converted into new digital values?”