A Mixed-Methods Study Into How Consumer Behaviour Affects Album Sales in the Music Industry.

Abstract

The music industry is an ever changing market, especially in terms of albums, with the expansion of the digital format and streaming in the last decade and the increase in vinyl sales in recent years. Therefore, this paper explores how consumer behaviour affects album sales and how marketing professionals can use this to market albums efficiently and effectively to boost album sales. This paper identifies some key topics that had to be investigated to produce a worthwhile research project, which includes examining consumer behaviour and external influences, how marketing techniques can influence album sales, the accessibility of music and how steaming and illegal downloading affect album sales and the music industry. This research project is important for marketing professionals to be able to market albums to consumers in the right way, leading to the most album sales possible, as well as to further investigate consumer behaviour within the music industry and album sales setting. The literature was reviewed to discuss the previous literature in this field, whilst also showing the shortfalls in the previous research as for certain areas of the literature there were gaps and sources that weren't relevant. The literature review discussed the main objectives in detail with consumer behaviour, marketing strategies, the accessibility of music and the digital revolution being the main focusses. This showed that consumers are split into certain categories that marketing professionals need to target dependent on what album is on sale and that streaming has a major influence on the decline of album sales. Whereas, word of mouth has a largely positive impact on album sales. This literature gave the basis of a research process, which was decided to be a mixed-methods approach including both quantitative and qualitative research. Using an explanatory sequential design, quantitative research was carried out first using online questionnaires before applying this research to a smaller sample within qualitative semi-structured interviews. The data set produced some key findings which were divided by research objectives. This included the need for marketing professionals to identify consumers into their specific demographic groups, using multichannel advertising, especially using social media to target consumers, that there has been an increase in the amount of early and middle adopters and that marketing professionals need to stress the benefits of buying albums physically instead of digitally or by streaming.