Commentary: Music's Digital Dance: Singing and Swinging from Product to Service

When Bob Marley performed “Trenchtown Rock” in 1971, he likely did not think of the song as a material object. His music partners and investors almost certainly did. To them, he created property that fans would want to purchase and make their own, or make “MINE,” as Morewedge et al. (2021; hereinafter Morewedge et al.) put it. I particularly enjoyed reading “Evolution of Consumption: A Psychological Ownership Framework” and commend the authors for a thought-provoking, fresh, and bold scholarly examination of technology-driven changes to consumption. Few industries experienced change in the relationship between consumers and their goods more than music, and because music is my field, I will focus my commentary there. The authors’ main claim is that “preserving psychological ownership . should be a priority for marketers and firm strategy. ” It is a very interesting proposition, and I explore what it means for music and venture into some of the business-side complexities involved. The paper proposes two ways consumption is changing. First, legal possession of private goods—for music, the most recent example is consumers’ owning compact discs—is succumbing to on-demand access to the goods and services owned by others—for music, the digits that constitute a streamed phonorecord. Second, experiential goods are displacing material goods. Is that so for music? Historically, music began as a performed service. It became a physical product with the invention of crude wire/string recordings and progressed through the first digital medium (piano rolls), to Edison’s wax cylinders, to RCA/Victor phonograph records, and then to cassettes and compact discs. Now, it mostly appears in subscriptions to digital carrier services. Truly, music has traveled from service to product and back to service, adapting to new technologies as they appeared. Music performances have changed, too. Acoustic became electric in the 1920s; before electric, artists controlled their music with their feet (if they were not in the room, you could not see them or hear them). Electricity brought loudspeakers and crowds bigger than could be counted from the stage. Radio and television followed with audiences that could only be sampled by media marketers; today, we can and do count and account for each stream delivered. In 1971, sound recording products were a trickle by comparison to the flood that began in 1972 when they attained U.S. copyright status. Five decades later, the product would return to a service, with physical sound carriers an afterthought—a relic bin of compact discs, vinyl, 8-track tapes, cassettes, and Edison cylinders. In this latest twist, music fans buy access to music through subscriptions or ad-supported “feels free” access, totaling more than 110 million paid subscribers in the United States alone as of this writing. The just-in-time arrival of streaming digits on demand—where and when you want them—conveys the ownership feel of an otherwise unobtainable collection of music, replete with lyrics, photos, and liner notes. As to the murkiness of rights, for centuries the authors of songs gleaned their experiential and printed value. In 1847, composer Ernest Bourget dined at the Paris Concert Café Ambassadeurs and refused to pay the check, reasoning that the Ambassadeurs played his music without paying him. A decade later, a French appeals court gave composers the right to collect payment for music use, which led to the formation of Agence Centrale for the joint administration of performance music