A taxonomy of digital music services

摘要

This paper investigates the current status of what we call Digital Music Services (DMS). Our research objective is gaining a better understanding of the properties of current DMS and investigating the relationship between service functionality and business model. In a longitudinal research project multiple researchers have contributed to making a taxonomy of current DMS. By recurrent induction and systematic comparison we derive four archetypes of DMS; Extended Radio Broadcasting (EBR), Personalized Internet Radio (PIR), Music Exchange Community (MEC) and Online Music retailers (OMR). A meta-analysis shows that the business model, service functionality and recommendation mechanism are the identifying characteristics of current DMS. We observe a tendency of DMS to start "drifting" between the archetypes and adopting properties from other archetypes. This is not without risk, as users have a rather fixed perspective of the relationship between the offered functionality and business model of the respective archetype