Areas that I will expect you to cover in the essay – you can focus on a sector of your choice but the suggestions below are based on the music industry.

Patterns of cultural participation – here for example you can discuss –history of the ‘analogue’ music business. Refer to Digital Medieval for an engaging history of the last 20 years.

Un-Convention is also an example of a change in  cultural participation.

Changes in production – examples of impact of a creative technology and digitalization. Here you can also bring in the impact on income streams through piracy and IP. The In Business – music industry radio (4/01/14) programme has useful information for this section.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03mj272/
“It has been long established that the music industry has changed irrevocably over the past decade, with the internet disrupting the status quo as it has many other sectors. But the story has moved on from an industry dying from dwindling record sales.
The traditional way of releasing your record has changed thanks to new publishing companies, companies that gather music statistics and the streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer. Now these companies are disrupting the industry once again. Peter Day speaks with the key businesses involved such as Spotify and Musicmetric and the traditional, established players such as Sony Music.
Yet streaming services have also caused controversy because their payments to musicians are seemingly minuscule. Radiohead’s lead singer Thom Yorke has battled against Spotify, calling it the ‘last fart of a dying corpse’ ; how can musicians make money now? Peter hears from a band just starting out, Yossarian, to Moby who has sold millions of records and singer songwriter Billy Bragg. We compare how much musicians receive from different sources of revenue.
But others see the streaming services as saviours and the future of the music industry. Is the problem of small returns from songs streamed actually a clash between a new way of listening to music and the traditional way the industry has been run? Sony Music explain how they are writing their record deals with musicians and that they are thinking about changing this for the new digital age.”

Consumption – distribution and marketing (Henderson C (2005) The Long Tail )
Influenced some of the move in music to thinking about doing things collectively.
For example you could use Un Convention as a case study which promotes the notion of or organising  collectively  and looks at creating a large global network of music.

Un-Convention was created in Manchester in 2008 by a collective of DIY record labels. It promotes events and initiatives crowd sourced from its community. It facilitates and supports music as a tool for social change and is a not for profit initiative.

You can also discuss the changes in consumer choices and also corporate responsibility. The session where we discussed corporate ownership of data through digitalization is of relevance here.

You may also want to talk about ‘gate keeping role changes’ – we will be looking at this in detail in week 8.

Conclusion  – do include some of your own views about the future. .