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Paper Session 3 (Friday 2:00-3:00) Salon A
Moderator: Jennifer Fowler

Graduated Responses to Online Piracy: Approaches Taken in the United States and Around the World

Serona Elton
Associate Professor and Chair, Music Media & Industry Department
University of Miami

Online piracy is a huge threat to all of the copyright industries. The copyright industries include music, as well as motion picture, press and literature, software, and others. Online piracy refers to the sharing of content, such as recorded music, movies, ebooks and computer programs, in violation of copyright laws (i.e. illegally), via the internet. Recent studies indicate that a significant amount of all internet traffic is generated by the use of peer-to-peer and cyberlocker sites, and most of the activity involves illegal file sharing. Opinions differ as to how to quantify the losses due to online piracy, however, there is general agreement among the copyright industries that it is a serious problem worthy of significant effort and attention. Efforts to combat online piracy in the United States have been underway since the late 1990s, and some approaches have proven more successful than others. One of the more recent approaches is the so-called graduated response which involves rights holders, and internet service providers (ISPs) and their subscribers. This paper examines the legal, political, and industrial origins and current state of the graduated response programs in each country.

Like X but with (wh)Y: Purpose Driven Marketing for Artists and Labels

George Howard
Associate Professor, Music Business/Management
Berklee College of Music

We are all familiar with the traditional idea of how marketers must present distinct competitive advantage for their releases, artists, or services. However, traditional marketing has for too long relied on comparative (feature-based) marketing or price-driven tactics in order to show distinctions between their products and their competitors’.

To succeed today, marketers must define and present a firm’s (label, artist, etc.) purpose in a concise and transparent manner. Purpose is the key for long-term success. Purpose, is for example, the key differentiator with respect to increasing a firm’s Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter was developed by, among others, Bain Consulting, and is a widely used tool that managers of firms employ to determine and quantify their customers’ loyalty. The higher a firm’s score, the more so-called Promoters they have; the lower the score, the more Detractors.

This paper will examine the relationship between increased Purpose and escalating NPS, and the related increase of firms’ so-called Promoters (and the decrease of Detractors). In an age of hyper-competition and hyper-connectivity, it is more important than ever that firms use Purpose to increase their NPS score, and, in so doing, shift the burden of promotion from themselves to their customers.

The presentation will examine both music-industry specific companies — such as TuneCore and Wolfgang’s Vault — who have used Purpose to increase customer attraction and retention, as well as non music-industry companies from both the Social Entrepreneurial sector (Toms Shoes and Warby Parker) and the pure for-profit sector (Whole Foods and Apple) who increase their NPS scores and profits due to a carefully orchestrated and managed articulation of Purpose.

Particular attention will be paid to ways in which artists, and others in the music-business industry, can apply these practices in order to gain competitive advantage in new and cost-effective manners, that will result in longer-term, sustainable advantage.