MANAGING CREATIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN DISRUPTED INDUSTRIES: A BUSINESS PLAN FOR ATHENA PUBLISHING LLC. ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Business Administration ______________________________________ by Nathan Finley April 2021 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Entrepreneurship Nathan Finley __________________________ Paul Mass Professor, Entrepreneurship Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Raymond Frost Director of Studies, Business Administration ___________________________ Dr. Donal Skinner Dean, Honors Tutorial College 1 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..4 Literature Review………………………………………………………………………….5 Identifying the Need for Review…………………………………………………………..5 Planning and Review Protocols…………………………………………………...............5 Synthesis and Review……………………………………………………………………..8 Digital Infringement……………………………………………………………...10 Blind Infringement……………………………………………………….10 DRM Systems……………………………………………………………11 Better Methods…………………………………………………………...13 IP Strategies……………………………………………………………………...14 Entrepreneurial…………………………………………………………..15 Accounting………………………………………………………………16 Legal……………………………………………………………………..17 Communitarian…………………………………………………………..18 Managing Talent…………………………………………………………………20 Accreditation……………………………………………………………..20 Internal Goals…………………………………………………………….22 Creative Process………………………………………………………….24 Literature Summary……………………………………………………………………...26 Methodology……………………………………………………………………………..27 The Traditional Business Plan…………………………………………………...28 The Business Model Canvas……………………………………………………..31 The Lean Start-up………………………………………………………………..32 Comparison and Chosen Method………………………………………………..34 Business Plan…………………………………………………………………………….36 Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………..36 Industry Overview……………………………………………………………………….40 Music Publishing Defined……………………………………………………….40 Key Terms………………………………………………………………………..41 Trends……………………………………………………………………………………45 External Analysis………………………………………………………………..46 Internal Analysis…………………………………………………………………49 Business Services………………………………………………………………………...50 Target Artists…………………………………………………………………….50 Target Partners…………………………………………………………………...51 Client Services…………………………………………………………………...52 Future Services…………………………………………………………………...54 Revenue Streams…………………………………………………………………55 Current Expenses………………………………………………………………...58 Future Expenses………………………………………………………………….58 Competition………………………………………………………………………………58 Success Stories…………………………………………………………………...59 Competitors………………………………………………………………………59 Management and Operations…………………………………………………………….62 2 Nate Finley………………………………………………………………………62 Operations………………………………………………………………………..63 Milestones and Financial Projections……………………………………………………65 Concluding Remarks…………………………………………………………………….68 References………………………………………………………………………………..69 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………….72 Discussion………………………………………………………………………………..79 Creating the Business Plan……………………………………………………….79 Managing Creative Talent………………………………………………………..80 Maintaining Consumer Interest…………………………………………………..81 Entrepreneurial Perspective……………………………………………………...82 Summary…………………………………………………………………………………82 Contributions…………………………………………………………………………….83 Implications………………………………………………………………………………84 Limitations……………………………………………………………………………….86 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………87 References……………………………………………………………………………......88 3 Introduction For a long time, music has been at the core of my goals. My passion for music has led me to pursue many different interests and opportunities. One of those opportunities was a study abroad to London organized by the College of Fine Arts. There, my mentor Professor André Gribou challenged me to research in depth the music industry and to grasp how the economies surrounding music function. After years of being a music fan and a business student, it was not until this instance that I discovered music publishing even existed. What a music publisher does is explained later in this paper, but what is important is the field grabbed my attention. The music publishing industry is convoluted, legally ambiguous, and constantly changing. In a field known for creativity, the publishing side is a frustratingly complex web of analytics and administration. I enjoyed it. Athena Publishing (AP) started when I was working under Professor Josh Antonuccio in the College of Media Arts and Sciences. I presented the idea for starting my own music publishing company, and he guided me on how it could be done. The end result of my study was a much better understanding of specific functions and organizations in the industry, the beginning of a business plan, and the ambition to carry it forward. I was directed to my thesis advisor, Paul Mass of the Center for Entrepreneurship. Under his mentorship, I was able to bring AP to life. I secured a $1,000 grant from the Bobcat Seed Fund to set the foundation for AP. This paper is the product of all my work under these mentors. Moreover, it is a guide for directing AP’s future growth. 4 Literature Review Identifying the Need for Review There is a need to understand the role intellectual property plays in the digital era in order to identify best practices for adapting to a disrupted creative industry. The digital revolution has disrupted the way songwriter’s intellectual property is managed, monitored, and accessed by licensees and music consumers. It remains uncertain how copyright owners can best ensure their intellectual property (IP) is being fully monitored and protected on digital platforms. Additionally, it is disputed what types of systems best serve IP owners.? How can IP owners take advantage of new technology to better monitor and market their controlled works? How can IP owners best manage their controlled works to prepare for future disruption? Insights to answer these questions can be gathered from analyzing literature on IP markets at large, because the new wave of technology has forced creative IP industries to restructure so significantly.The questions to be elaborated on for this review is as follows: i. What are the current themes in relevant literature pertaining to commercialization of creative intellectual property? ii. Reiteration: What are the key success factors for commercializing creative intellectual property? Planning and Review Protocols The resource used in gathering documents for this review was the primary available database from Ohio University’s Alden Library for business research, Business Source Complete. This was ideal for aggregating academic works which will be limited to peer reviewed research from academic journals. The documents were also limited to 5 those written in English, so that the information is relevant to where AP is to be based and could be best reviewed given my own known language. An abundance of information was from these documents, so there was enough evidence to support the themes identified across all citations. The level of searches was set to only search for the words included in the search string and only search within the title and subject line of the document. By being strict in this way the results were narrowed to the most relevant articles. Documents were limited to those published after 2010. This narrowed the search to information released into the maturity of the digital era. In technology terms, this places applicable research several years after the releases of such products like iTunes, smartphones, and music streaming to ensure the documents uncovered accounted for those innovations in their themes and predictions. For this industry, looking too far back means not being able to see the future. However, it was advantageous to make exceptions to this limit, especially and exclusively for documents pertaining to a firm or professional reacting to a disruption in the intellectual property market. In other words, any work that shed light on the methodology of how intellectual property owners prepare for or react to dramatic change. A variety of keywords were tested to develop search strings for aggregating documents. The four roots the keywords were based from were pulled from the review outline: Intellectual Property, Creative, Commercialize, Disruption. These four keywords were then expanded by 40 alternatives, ten per root. With the keywords, a list of 10 optimal search strings targeting no more than 50 results each was established. They are outlined in the following table: 6 From these 225 results, 17 articles were removed after manually applying exclusion criteria in a review of each article’s abstract. Then, a relevancy grade of 0-9, with 0 being the least relevant and 9 being the most relevant, was applied to each of the remaining 208 results, deeming articles with scores 7-9 applicable to review. The final pool of applicable articles to review totaled 64. A table reiterating the inclusion/exclusion criteria is below, followed by a table outlining the relevancy grading criteria: 7 Synthesis and Review In synthesizing the notes from the relevant literature explained previously, I have identified conversations within creative intellectual property (IP) industries worth considering for the development of any creative IP firm. Most notable was infringement in the digital era and new strategies for managing IP. By putting into discussion