A contextual theory of accessing music: Consumer behavior and ethical arguments

Abstract

Previous research into the ethics of accessing information goods using alternative means (the informal economy or social exchanges) has failed to study the moral arguments used by music consumers to justify their behavior or explain actions they considered to be (un)ethical. To fill this gap, we conducted a study from the perspective of music consumers in which we grounded a theory that would explain and predict individual arguments and behavior. Our findings suggest that the morality of accessing culture depends on the social, economic and cultural context in which an individual has been raised. Interestingly, this contextual aspect interacts with economic and cultural resources, affecting the moral arguments used to justify behavior. Lastly, we describe a model that explains variations in the contextual theory in regard to accessing music and that predicts consumer behavior in other countries that can be classified in either of the two contexts delineated in our research.

Keywords:

• ethical decision making
• music consumption
• peer‐to‐peer networks
• consumer research
• social exchanges
• accessing music
• grounded theory

Acknowledgments

The authors express their appreciation to the anonymous reviewers, the editors of this special issue and the attendees of the 2007 Culture, Politics and Policies conference held in Lille (France), 15–17 March, for their kind and helpful comments on a previous draft. This research was funded by Grant Number ECO2008‐0410/ECON of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER, and by the Centre for Research and Studies in Humanities of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.