Transmedia Music: The Values of Music as a Transmedia Asset

Faced with the technological, economic and cultural evolutions of the entertainment world, the music industry has to engage with new business models and consumption habits—suffice it to consider the drop in album sales and the rise of subscription streaming services, such as Spotify. In the meantime, as this book demonstrates, industrial and cultural convergence has opened up new creative and commercial possibilities, allowing single industries to become part of larger networks of synergies that can create value from multiple businesses, outlets and audiences by spreading one core idea, or concept, across different media. This is most evident in franchises based on audiovisual products, where the characters, along with the storytelling they generate, are the foundation of a transmedia storyworld. However, the music industry too has embraced not only cross-media distribution principles, but also world-building and transmedia storytelling models, mixing and remediating itself with other media languages in order to produce narratives and experiences that are centered on music. Thus, this chapter explores the ways the music industry can generate cultural and economic value through transmedia projects, and seek to assess the role of music in the diverse transmedia storyworlds that these projects generate.