En ny musikarena utan solister
The music industry has been subject to great changes during the last ten years. The most significant factor contributing to this change is the increasing usage of broadband and thereby the increasing frequency of downloading music illegally. Music piracy and file sharing have caused record sales to plummet. Consumers have now moved on to consuming music in a digital format, not only through downloading but also from streaming music online, an activity partly made possible by social media channels such as YouTube. As the consumption patterns have changed companies within the music industry have been forced to find other sources of income than record sales and they have also needed to find alternate ways to market their artists. Universal Music has been cooperating with several companies in a sponsorship-like manner, supplying the partner companies with music services when marketing their products. The use of music in the partners? marketing strategies has been a way of differentiating them from competitors and creating an increased value for their consumers. In this thesis we have studied four cases when Universal Music has cooperated with other external companies. We aimed to learn how Universal Music could derive value from these partnerships by analyzing the value created for the partner companies and also the value created for their consumers. We found that the partnerships gave Universal Music not only an increased venue for their communication, but also an increased income. The partner companies could differentiate themselves from their competitors by claiming a more emotional position and thereby attracting consumers.