The Community Model of Content Management

1. Motivation and Introduction Information and communication technology not only provides new kinds of content, but also new designs for the production, packaging, multiplying and distribution of it. As a consequence , novel business models are possible where new actors are involved in various processes along the value chain. This paper contributes to the discussion of the impact of technology on business models for content management. Our example is the music industry. This industry, which now combines the traditional off line industry and the novel services such as MP3.com, Napster.com, and gnutella, is a prominent example of the role of technology plays in creating economic value through new business models for content management. We focus on one particular business model, virtual communities. We argue that community and content management are inseparable in the novel services for content management. We present one specific community model for content management , discuss it, and illustrate it with is applications and structures in the music industry. This paper is organized as follows. First, we analyze the characteristics of content on the Internet as a digital product (Sect. 2). Second, we look at the role of communities regarding the management of content (Sect. 3). In this chap-is a digital counterpart to analogue as well as other digital data formats in this case, compact disks and cassettes. Television has both conventional and digital broadcast formats. Digital content can be distributed processed and stored in high volumes with the means of information technology. As the digital technology becomes a commodity good, anyone can easily create, package, or modify content. Moreover, digital content is accessible to machines for all kinds of processing – this increases the availability of content and makes the contents more valuable than conventional counterparts (cf. on the value of information (Sha-piro and Varian, 1999)) 2. Content is linked. As the Internet can be seen as an electronic network, the content is embedded in and part of this network. This is most easily seen when one compares an isolated web page to the page as a part of a Web site or an information system or an online application. An isolated site or a single web page is of little utility or value – it will hardly be visited. However, when a page is linked, it will be accessed through customers and becomes valuable. In many cases, the value of the content results from a …