Editorial

This October issue of the International Journal of Music Business Research is published with only two research articles and one book review because the number of qualitative submissions has decreased in recent months. I would therefore like to appeal to all readers to use the journal as a platform to present their research results to a scientific community and to put them up for discussion.

In this issue, the opportunity was taken by Dan G. Hodges Jr. to present his research on Music City Nashville in Tennessee. Nashville, the Eldorado of US country music, has all the characteristics of an industrial cluster that formed along 16th and 17th avenues and became world famous as Music Row. Over the decades, numerous labels (including all the majors, namely Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers), music publishers, artists’ agencies and the music collecting society Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) have settled there and generate economically significant added value for the city. Hodges highlights in his contribution that the Nashville music industry cluster is subject to a life cycle that can be divided into an emerging phase, a growing phase, a sustaining phase and a declining phase. In order to determine where Nashville is in its life cycle, the author analysed existing studies and conducted numerous interviews with stakeholders and concluded that Nashville's famous Music Row is in the sustaining phase and is in danger of slipping into the declining phase unless action is taken quickly.

The second article by Zarja Peters and Phillip Cartwright looks at the role of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the music business. This application based on blockchain technology has become widespread in the music industry in recent years, and as a prominent example of this phenomenon, we might recall to mind Snoop Dogg's latest album “Bacc on Death Row”. The authors now turn to the economic, legal and regulatory challenges posed by NFTs. To this end, a quantitative online survey was conducted to measure the prevalence and awareness of NFTs and to ascertain what potential, if any, it is that music creators saw in NFTs. The result was sobering. Knowledge of NFTs among music consumers and musicians is very low, and many young entrepreneurs in the music business who want to take advantage of the new technology face an unregulated market with high financial risk. Therefore, the authors conclude: “The responsibility of regulators and legislators is to enact protective technical, IP-related and regulatory frameworks that permit the minting and trading of NFTs to occur in a regulated environment.”

The October issue is concluded by Ben Morgen's book review on “Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation” by Nick Seaver, which was published in 2022 at University of Chicago Press.

The IJMBR is aimed at all academics around the world, from students to professors, from all disciplines and with an interest in music business research. Interdisciplinary papers will be especially welcome if they address economic and business-related topics in the field of music. We look forward to receiving as many interesting papers as possible. Please submit your articles at the journal's webpage: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ijmbr/default1.aspx.