If I had a song: The culture of digital community networks and its impact on the music industry

Abstract Technological innovations have always influenced the ways in which music is made and consumed in societies. Now that music has entered the digital realm a new revolution is underway, one in which fundamental changes in nearly all aspects of the culture of modern music experience are being driven by the interaction between technological innovations and the social impacts of those innovations. The Internet enables the development of widely dispersed, interactive audiences for musical products and services, and therefore the emergence of highly fragmented and highly specific niche markets for any conceivable form of music. One striking effect of the transformation of music from an analog to a digital entity has been a shift in power from the large and established music industry institutions to digital community networks. These new virtual communities of individual technology users, both as artists and as consumers, have evolved as dynamic and self‐organizing entities based on patterns of electronic information interchange. The effects of this redistribution of power are manifesting themselves as shifts in cultural values: in behavioral changes, attitudinal changes, and even fundamental shifts in ethical judgments.