Sony Music as first mover in the future of music business

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sony Music Austria is part of Sony Music Entertainment. The company has numerous services and products that they provide. In its modern form, Sony Music Entertainment has generally undergone massive developments, particularly through modern communication trends with its amount of digital music service platforms which have redefined the relationship between artists and fans.

Sony benefits from a long-lasting business relationship with PhonoNet, which is a shared service company and provides one of the most extensive music database within the music and entertainment industry in Austria, called eMediaCatalog.

Goals

The main goal of the project was to create and illustrate multiple future scenarios of the music consumption behavior in 2030. Building on these elaborated scenarios, the aim was to develop various implications and recommendations for our project partners in order to help them become first movers in the music industry and to keep up with their strong market position.

Methodology

Based on extensive literature research and several interviews, a trend analysis was done, which was used to get an understanding of how and why things might change over time. Next to other tools like an impact-predictability matrix or causal loop diagrams, a very crucial part was to define two primary axes representing two independent trend with high uncertainty for the scenario matrix. The combination with the extremes of the other axes resulted in an outcome of four very different scenarios. The following step was to then find out individual customer needs for each scenario using TOWS-matrix and Johnson et al business model to develop strategic implications for the future.

Results

Results show, it is clear that each individual scenario provides different challenges and opportunities for our project partners. As a final step, strategic recommendations and early warning signals were developed which will definitely help to act instead of react, whatever the future holds.

Cooperation Partner

• Sony Music Entertainment Austria GmbH
  Mariahilfer Straße 77-79
  1060 Wien
  Österreich

• PhonoNet
  Gesellschaft für Handels- und EDV Dienstleistungen m.b.H.
  Seilerstätte 18-20
  1010 Wien

Contact Person

• Niklas Gusenbauer, MA

• Albert Manzinger, BA

Student team

• Isabella Vilsmeier

• Johanna Disslbacher-Fink

• Mathias Schneider

• Martin Feldbacher

• Sebastian Cisar

Project-Manager

• Caroline Fabian

• Alexander Staub