Value creation and appropriation in the live music industry: a population ecology analysis of live music ticket pricing

ABSTRACT The music industry has grown to depend financially on live events, making value creation and appropriation critical. Connecting the resource-based view and organisation population ecology, this study investigates how generalist and specialist live music event producers differ in their ability to create and appropriate value. Evidence based on 631 live music events shows that generalists are able to create and appropriate more value than specialists by setting higher minimum prices and employing more price categories. The generalisability of the findings is discussed by describing which market conditions drive the effect of niche width on value creation and appropriation, identifying high fixed costs paired with a superstar effect and a heavy reliance on status as likely candidates.


Introduction
With the advent of the new millennium, the music industry has been undergoing a socalled revolution, as the prevalence of recorded music waned in favour of the digital and live music sectors (Gateau, 2014;Moreau, 2013;Tschmuck, 2012). The rise of digital downloading and streaming services has eroded the margins that music labels and artists used to generate with the sales of recorded music. Yet, the emerging business models have so far fallen short of providing musicians and music producers with an alternative source of revenue able to guarantee economic stability (Kusek & Leonhard, 2005). Thus, music industry players have come to rely more and more on revenues from concerts and live events (Connolly & Krueger, 2006;Holt, 2010), to the point that the live music industry has surpassed recorded music to become the highest grossing sector of the music industry at the onset of the new millennium (Curien & Moreau, 2009;Mortimer et al., 2012). In parallel, organisations operating in the live events sector, such as Live Nation, have largely overgrown most major music labels, such as Universal and Sony (Ingham, 2016).
Given the current market conditions, it is thus of the utmost importance for music industry players to create and appropriate as much value as possible from live events. Yet, the live music industry is currently affected by two phenomena that inhibit the ability of concert producers and artists to create and appropriate value: the secondary markets and underpricing. In the context of live entertainment events, the secondary markets are those marketplaces involving all ticket transactions that happen after the primary sale operated by the official ticket seller -including concertgoers re-selling tickets they can no longer use and professional ticket re-sellers, such as brokers and scalpers who re-sell tickets for a profit (Courty, 2000). The latter account for a large majority of the secondary revenues, as an estimated 9 out of 10 tickets re-sold in secondary markets come from professional brokers (Cardenas, 2016), building up a market worth of around $8 billions a year (Cookson, 2016). On top of that, the digital revolution not only fostered the erosion of recorded music margin, but it also enhanced the ease of ticket re-sale through internet platforms (Perez, 2016), which drove the involvement of large primary market agents -such as eBay, Ticketmaster, and LiveNation -in the secondary markets (Cardenas, 2016;Cookson, 2016). Notwithstanding the blurred boundaries between primary and secondary markets, event producers and performers are undoubtedly leaving value on the table, and this is exacerbated by the generalised tendency to underprice tickets.
Underpricing is a widespread practice in the live music industry and several factors encourage its implementation, including both economic and psychological motives (Courty & Pagliero, 2014;Leslie & Sorensen, 2014;Rosen & Rosenfield, 1997). As far as the former are concerned, the sales of ancillary goods -such as food, drinks, and parking -and complementary goods -such as records and merchandise -benefit from having a larger audience at the venue. Moreover, the "sold-out effect" of an artist's tour often translates into future sold-out concerts, thus pushing producers to keep ticket prices as low as possible to increase attendance. Linked to this economic consideration is the psychological motive that making a music event sold-out generally has a beneficial effect on the audience's enjoyment of the show, as producers "want people to feel that they've come to the hottest show in town" (personal communication with a Professor of Practice in Music and Entertainment Industry at Syracuse University, USA, 4 September 2014). Finally, many artists tend to care for the long-term management of their fans and strive to sell tickets at price-points that are perceived as fair. As a result, artists and producers do not engage in dynamic pricing as much as other live event producers do (Courty, 2015), even if current technological tools would allow this (Chan-Olmsted, 2019) and consumers would be willing to pay a premium for tickets, as shown by the thriving of secondary markets.
The inability to appropriate the value that live music event producers generate for consumers appears to be endemic in the live music industry. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the extent of this inability is similar among different market segments or whether different players differ in their ability to create and appropriate value, and thus whether some categories of players enjoy a competitive advantage. This study applies an organisation population ecology lens to this phenomenon, studying how the niche width of an agent affects its ability to create value (Carroll, 1985;Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000). By integrating competitive advantage logics in value creation and appropriation informed by the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991;Peteraf, 1993) with organisation population ecology, specifically concerning the degree of generalism -or niche-width -that players occupy in a given industry (Carroll, 1985;Freeman & Hannan, 1983), the current study aims to understand whether the niche occupied by a given player impacts such player's ability to create and appropriate value.
Resource-partitioning theory (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000) suggests that specialists can occupy fostering niches in mature industries characterised by status and identity consumption -e.g. the music industry (Larsen et al., 2010). However, the specific economic characteristics and transaction costs of the live music industry seem to indicate that generalists enjoy a competitive advantage and are able to create more value compared to specialists. Testing the effect of niche-width (generalist vs specialist) on value creation and appropriation with ticket pricing data of 631 live music events in Italy, this study assessed the minimum ticket price and the number of price categories employed in the sale tickets as indicators of value creation and appropriation respectively, finding that generalists create and appropriate more value than specialists in live music.
This study contributes to organisation population ecology theories, as well as to the literature on business in the media and creative industries, as it sheds light on the value creation problem that has been plaguing the live music industry. By borrowing from the resource-based view (Foss & Foss, 2005;Peteraf, 1993) and linking it with organisation population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), it shows how specific characteristics of the live music industry allow generalists to enjoy a more favourable position than specialists. This extends studies of niche-width and counteracts arguments and findings from other industries (cf., Swaminathan, 1995Swaminathan, , 2001. In addition, these findings inform media business studies and can be extended to creative and media industries other than live music or journalism (Achtenhagen, 2016;Sherrill et al., 2021). The mechanism giving an advantage to generalists is highly dependent on the interplay between the ability to spread fixed costs on a wider audience and the ability to maintain and display a high level of status. So, industries -such as television (Chan-Olmsted & Guo, 2011;Moe, 2012) where the production of goods and services simultaneously entails a substantial amount of fixed costs and is highly dependent on the producer's status and legitimacy are likely to display similar dynamics in favour of generalists.

Value creation and appropriation
Transaction cost theory was developed in the 1970s to study why firms exist and what conditions make transactions more efficient in hierarchical organisations than in markets (Williamson, 1981(Williamson, , 1985. Subsequent developments of transaction cost theory have focussed on how these costs impact processes such as value creation -the surplus arising from the gap between production cost and consumers' utility -and value appropriationthe ability to capture the surplus generated -in the context of the resource-based view of the firm (Foss & Foss, 2005;Mizik & Jacobson, 2003;Silverman, 1999). Given that value creation is the basis of sustainable competitive advantage according to the resource-based view, it is of the utmost importance for organisations to reduce transactions costs in order to appropriate the value they generate (Barney, 1991;Peteraf, 1993).
Integrating the resource-based view, which is often used to explain media management phenomena (Oba & Chan-Olmsted, 2007), with organisation population ecology dynamics (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), which was born in the furrows of media management (Achtenhagen, 2016) and has been applied to neighbouring media industries (Cook & Sirkkunen, 2013), the current research studies the effect of generalism on value creation and appropriation in the context of ticket sales for live music events. Past research highlighted the benefits of specialisation, especially in industries where status and identity consumption are very consequential (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000), as is the case of the music industry (Larsen et al., 2010). Nonetheless, the economics characteristics and transaction costs of the live music industry would suggest that it is a particularly fertile context for generalists.

Generalists and specialists
Organisational ecology scholars have studied how the degree of generalism of a firm might affect its survival and success prospects, analysing the dynamics of specialist organisationswhich thrive on a narrow range of inputs from the environment -and comparing them to those of generalist organisations -which rely on a wider range of environmental resources, including a wider pool of potential customers (Carroll, 1985;Freeman & Hannan, 1983). Drawing on a wider resource space and appealing to a broader range of customer tastes, generalist firms compete on efficiency using scale and scope economies, whereas specialists rely on narrow resource spaces and specialise in a single product niche, usually targeting a specific range of customers (Barroso & Giarratana, 2013). The differences between generalists and specialists have been studied through the concept of niche width, defined as the range of environmental resources an organisation relies upon for its survival and thriving (Carroll, 1985;see also, Dobrev et al., 2001;Freeman & Hannan, 1983).
According to niche theory, the realised niche of a population is the constrained resource space in which a population exists by outcompeting all other populations. While generalists occupy a larger resource space, several studies have shown that specialists can enjoy a competitive advantage compared to generalists thanks to a better focus (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), for instance, when targeting market segments that value organisational identity and status consumption (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000). This argument has been formalised through resource-partitioning theory (Carroll, 1985;Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000;Dobrev et al., 2001), whose aim is to explain the emergence and fostering of specialist organisations in mature and consolidated markets.
The music industry supplies a hedonic product, and not only does it rely heavily on status (Connolly & Krueger, 2006), but it is also characterised by uncertain demand with fine-grained variations (Cloonan, 2012). Thus, based on past organisational ecology research and resource-partitioning models (Carroll, 1985;Hannan & Freeman, 1977), it might seem that specialists in this field would enjoy an advantage. Yet, countering this argument, some peculiar features of the live music industry -such as high fixed costs and the superstar effect (Connolly & Krueger, 2006) -suggest that live music is a more fertile ground for generalists than for specialists. In particular, there are two main sets of factors that seem to confer generalist live music event producers an advantage over their specialist counterparts: The economic characteristics of live music events and the management of the transaction costs involved in the production of such events.

The economic characteristics of live music events
Existing arts and media management literature explains that music concerts as economic goods are characterised by five main features: high fixed costs, their nature as experience goods, perishability, versioning, and the existence of strong complementary goods (Connolly & Krueger, 2006). These characteristics are likely to generate more favourable conditions for generalist than for specialist event producers, because the large audiences, substantial production costs, and the imperfect substitutability of supply give rise to a superstar effect. In superstar industries, a limited number of suppliers is able to appropriate a disproportionately high amount of revenues and rewards are highly skewed (Connolly & Krueger, 2006). Thus, given that the economic features of concerts are closely linked to audience breadth, a wider audience translates into the ability to spread those costs more effectively, giving a value creation advantage to generalists. Hereunder these features are described more in detail.

High fixed costs
The cost of organising, producing, and promoting live music events is largely fixed, as most costs are independent of the number of actual tickets sold. This phenomenon fosters the rise of the superstar effect (Connolly & Krueger, 2006). Based on high fixed costs of production and on the imperfect substitution of suppliers -which depends on talent-based status differences in the music industry -superstars are able to appropriate a vast majority of the resource space (Rosen & Cohn, 1981; see also, Coelho & Mendes, 2019;Meiseberg, 2014). In this way, generalist event producers, who are able to contract the superstar performers thanks to their more abundant economic and social resources, have a considerable advantage, as they can spread the fixed operational costs related to event production over a wider audience.

Experience goods
As several products of cultural and entertainment industries, live music events are experience goods, which means that consumers are often unable to precisely assess in advance the expected value and utility they will derive from their consumption (Papies & van Heerde, 2017). Concerts are social experiences and, as such, it is difficult for prospective consumers to assign them an economic value. Yet, this uncertainty is mitigated when the performer has a very high status and credibility. Status information is usually communicated to audiences through "buzz" communication and travels mostly through word-of-mouth, especially in current, highly digitised environment (Chaney, 2012). As the higher status achieved by superstars reduces expected value uncertainty in the eyes of consumers, generalist producers, and mainstream performers are better able to target a wide audience, thus more efficiently spreading fixed costs and enhancing value creation.

Perishable goods
Tickets for live music events are mostly one-off: Once the event is finished, the ticket does not hold any more economic value and its opportunity cost is zero (O'Reilly et al., 2014). This pushes event organisers to underprice tickets, as any unsold tickets at the time of the event turn into lost revenues. The eventuality of unsold tickets is much more likely for specialist promoters: the latter, due to their market position, generally associate with niche performers, whose performance quality is more uncertain in the eyes of consumers and thus generates a lower expected value. To account for this uncertainty, specialist producers are thus more strongly driven to underprice tickets to their events than generalists are. In other words, lower performer status exacerbates the general tendency to underprice tickets, harming the value creation and appropriation ability of specialist producers compared to their generalist counterparts.

Versioning
This characteristic of concert tickets refers to the ability of event organisers to sell different versions of the same product -i.e. access to the music event. While specialist producers, with their niche audience, are often relegated to smaller venues, generalists are often able to arrange huge live music performances in large and dedicated venues. Moreover, the audience of generalist events is wider and more diverse than the audience of niche concerts. The possibility to employ versioning allows event organisers to pricediscriminate and thus reduce underpricing, but the ability to do so is limited in the case of specialists compared to their generalist counterparts due to logistical concerns and audience composition.

Complementary products
Live music tickets have several complementary goods, ranging from music records to merchandising, from digital music to ancillary goods -such as food and drinks. While large producers are generally able to rent and manage a whole venue, thus ensuring several revenue streams besides entrance fees, specialists often only rely on ticket sales (Cloonan, 2012). The ability of large producers to profit from the sale of ancillary goodsincluding parking fees, merchandising fees, food, and drinks -allows them to diversify the sources of revenue and reduce risk, on average increasing the creation of value. Generalist producers benefit from their bargaining power and counteract the general tendency of the industry to underprice by complementing ticket revenues with ancillary revenues. Specialists, on the other hand, lack this revenue diversification ability and are constrained to depend only on ticket sales, which increases risk and decreases their ability to create and appropriate value.

Transaction costs in live music events
Not only should generalists enjoy a competitive advantage compared to specialists thanks to the economic characteristics of live music events, but also thanks to their ability to manage transaction costs more efficiently. Transaction costs are generally divided into three broad categories: search and information costs, bargaining and decision costs, and enforcement costs (Dahlman, 1979). Building on this taxonomy, Foss and Foss (2005) exemplify four sources of relevant transaction costs, namely contract drafting, monitoring, attribute measuring, and barriers to entry and innovation. In the context of live music events, generalists are expected to create and appropriate more value by being better at managing these four kinds of transaction costs, as detailed below.

Contract drafting
Generalist live music event producers tend to either enjoy a close relation with venues or directly own some of the largest concert venues (e.g. Live Nation owns many arenas throughout the world 1 ). While the management of whole venues, including ancillary and complementary revenue streams, might suggest a higher extent of contractual complexity, this complexity dissipates when considering factors such as direct venue ownership or the diffusion of 360° contracts among generalists. 360° contracts allow one corporation to draft a single contract with a performing music artist to cover the management of all potential revenue streams, including live event tickets, merchandise, and licencing revenues (Karubian, 2009). Live Nation has notably been the market player most prone to employing these full-fledged contracts, which greatly reduce costs related to contract drafting and enforcement (Wikström, 2013).

Monitoring
Monitoring costs are related to moral hazard -i.e. the eventuality that one party might change their behaviour to the detriment of another party after a transaction has taken place (Hölmstrom, 1979). In the case of live music events, ticket re-sellers in the secondary market engage in such detrimental actions by re-selling tickets at an increased price after bulk-buying them from primary sources (Courty, 2000). Event producers are thus incentivised to diversify their ticket offer to discourage this kind of behaviour and, in turn, the proliferation of secondary ticket markets. In this way they can manage to better appropriate the value they generate for consumers with the sale of event tickets. Generalist producers tend to have an advantage in this regard, as the costs for monitoring other market players are often considerable (S.D. Williamson, 1986), and spreading them over the large audiences of mainstream events makes their impact on the price of a single ticket proportionally negligible compared to niche events produced by specialists. This difference is exacerbated when considering that generalist event producers often directly operate in the secondary market thanks to their market position, a move which greatly reduces their monitoring costs in comparison to specialist event producers (Cardenas, 2016).

Attribute measuring
The problem of attributes assessment is closely related to the problem of adverse selection -i.e. a situation in which a party in a transaction is harmed by asymmetric information (Akerlof, 1970). Related to the status and uncertainty arguments discussed above, this problem is particularly relevant for specialists in the context under investigation, because mainstream artists, who appeal to a wide audience and are generally managed by generalist producers, are endowed with high status. Status, defined as the perceived quality of a product compared to the quality of its competitors' products (Podolny, 1993), acts as a guarantee for the value of a concert in the eyes of the audience, thus reducing the uncertainty related to the costs of purchasing a ticket compared to the expected benefits of attending the show. Niche performers generally lack status in comparison to their mainstream counterparts, so the uncertainty linked to the value that their live performance will generate is higher. This affects negatively both supply and demand. On the supply side, niche producers tend to lower prices to make sure the event sells well, also because of the sold-out bias mentioned above (Courty & Pagliero, 2014).
On the demand side, consumers would be less prone to purchase tickets for an event of uncertain value to them. Specialist producers thus might create (more) value for some categories of consumers, but their incentive to sell-out an event will exacerbate their inability to create value for the general audience, as it is often harder for them to understand the amount of value they create for the market. Because specialists might have less information about their target market, they are more affected by adverse selection and thus tend to underprice more than their generalist counterparts.

Barriers to entry
Barriers to enter the music industry are not negligible: While the investment needed to produce and launch new music is decreasing thanks to technological advancements (Lewis et al., 2005), established players still manage to force most potential entrants out (or at the boundaries) of the mainstream market thanks to oligopolistic control over valuable channels of promotion, such as radio airplay and massive advertisement (see, Alexander, 1994;Anderson, 2006). Thanks to their higher financial and social capital, generalist event producers are able to maintain substantial control over the organisation of concerts by mainstream acts, whose high-status is a good predictor of commercial success. In this way, generalist producers foster a virtuous cycle that, also considering their ability to vertically integrate, leaves specialists at the outskirts of the market, forced to survive in less fertile resource spaces (Cloonan, 2012).
In sum, it appears that the economic characteristics of the live music industry provide an advantage for players that rely upon a wide arrange of resources (e.g. broad audience), who enjoy high status, and who control complementary products -i.e. generalists. Similarly, generalists have a better ability to manage transaction costs, such as contract drafting and barriers to entry, and mitigate the problem of attribute measuring with status and broad audiences. Thus, based on both the economic characteristics of live music events and the management of transaction costs, generalist live music event producers can create and appropriate more value than their specialist counterparts.
Hypothesis 1a: Generalist live music event producers create more value than specialist live music event producers.
Hypothesis 1b: Generalist live music event producers appropriate more value than specialist live music event producers.

Sample
In order to test the hypothesis presented above, I focussed on the pricing policies that event producers enforce as a proxy for their ability to create and appropriate value. I collected data about the pricing schemes of all music events available for consultation on the website Ticketone.it in a period of five consecutive weeks in September and October 2014. Ticketone is the main online and offline retailer of entertainment tickets in Italy, as it sells tickets for entertainment events both through its own website and through a network of authorised physical retailers spread in the territory (Prisco et al., 2017). As confirmed by a personal communication with a Live Nation ticketing manager, at the time of data collection Ticketone had an agreement with most small and big event promoters, including Live Nation, to sell tickets for their events and it held a quasimonopolistic control of the market. 2 It was thus a natural choice to collect data from the Ticketone platform, as it was the supplier of tickets for most non-negligible live music events organised in the Italian market. I collected most of the data directly accessing the price information available on the website, except for some rare instances in which price data were not available, such as in the case of sold-out events. In these instances, I checked other reliable websites, such as the website of the venue hosting the event, of the headline band, or of the event itself to gather the information about the number and price-point of the price categories. In the rare cases when the information was not available from any reliable source, I dropped the entry, so that the database has no missing data. The total amount of entries collected in the sample is 759, each entry indicating a single event or show. To the benefit of internal consistency, in the current study, given the difficulty in comparing status across different sub-genres, I only included live music events coded as pop-rock (82% of the total), and I excluded events in the classical, musical and theatre, and metal categories. The final database was composed of 631 entries.

Value creation -Minimum price tag
In order to measure the ability of event producers and artists to create value for their audiences, I measured the minimum price tag set for each live music event. While maximum prices have a considerable variance, especially considering the fact that some events (almost 3.5% of the total number of events accounted for) offer the opportunity to purchase expensive VIP packages, minimum prices are a more reliable indicator of what is the value that producers expect all potential concert-goers to be ready to pay in order to attend the event. This represents well the amount of value the producers and artists are able to create for the wide, mainstream audience. The prices in the database are in Euro and are comprehensive of pre-sale rights but not of any further services offered by Ticketone, such as delivery and the printing of fan-tickets.

Value appropriation -Number of price categories
The value creation skills of live music event producers also depend on their ability to maximise the revenues stemming from different categories of customers. The number of price categories used to sell tickets for an event represents well the ability of event promoters to cater various categories of consumers in the market, thus allowing for the appropriation of a larger extent of value thanks to a more nuanced pricing of tickets. This is consistent with past research on pricing, which highlighted how different price levels help appropriate more value by tapping into the different utilities of different categories of consumers (Burkert et al., 2017;Hinterhuber, 2004;Morris & Calantone, 1990). Given the limited prevalence of dynamic pricing (in the primary market) in live music compared to other live event industries, such as sports (Courty, 2015), the ability to offer consumers different prices categories catered to their different consumption utility is a strong signal of the performer's ability to appropriate the value created for its diverse audience. It is noteworthy to mention that in the current study I merged into a single category instances of multiple ticket types sold at the same price-point, as the focus of this empirical study is on economic value. Moreover, reductions have not been accounted for, as their presence is mostly limited to a very small number of theatrical shows in Italy due to the policy of most promoters -including Live Nation Italia -to not set any reduction or discount, except when imposed by the artist's management. 3

Generalism
Generalists are defined as those market players that draw on a wide resource space and appeal to a broad range of customer tastes (Barroso & Giarratana, 2013). With the aim of studying the extent of generalism of the live music events featured in my database, I collected data on the HitParadeItalia.it website about top-selling singles and albums charts for the focal year (2014) and the preceding year 4 . I coded generalism into a binary variable, indicating as generalist all the events with performers who managed to feature at least one single or one album in the Top 100 chart of either year, and specialists all those which did not. This measure, while possibly biased for recent success, is a good representation of the status of the performing artist at the time of the live event. As direct data on the niche width of events producers were not available, based on the arguments developed in the theoretical section above and on personal communications with live music experts, the mainstream success of the performing act is regarded as a sensible proxy of generalism.

Control variables
To test the hypothesised relationships with the proposed measures, I included in the regression models several control variables about other features of live music events. Specifically, I controlled for the characteristics of the performing artist -i.e. whether it is an individual artist or a collective and whether it is a national or international performerbecause these factors might influence pricing, also in light of the superstar effect (Courty & Pagliero, 2014;Krueger, 2005). I further controlled for specific characteristics of the event which might also affect pricing strategies, including whether the event is a one-off or part of a tour, and whether it happens on a weekday or on a weekend (Cloonan, 2012;Courty & Pagliero, 2014). Finally, to partial out the influence of the kind of venue on the number of price categories, I controlled for the kind of venue that the concert took place in (cf., Courty & Pagliero, 2014). Thus, the controls include:

Band
A binary dummy variable to differentiate whether the main act was an individual performer or an ensemble, a duo, a band, an orchestra or any other kind of collective.

Italian
A binary dummy variable to differentiate whether the act was an Italian performer or an international performer.

Tour
A tour was defined here as the repetition of the same act for at least three dates performed by the same artist in the same venue or in different venues within the country in the amount of time recorded in this study. This binary dummy variable differentiated whether a performance is part of a tour or whether it is a one-off event.

Weekend
This binary dummy variable indicates whether the event was performed on a weekend night (Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays) or on a weeknight.

Venue
I collected and coded data on the venue of the concerts. In the context of this study, I coded the venue as a binary variable, taking Arena as the reference category to which all other kinds of venues (Open air, Club, Theatre, and Other) are compared, as arenas are generally the venues in which mainstream acts perform and also the ones usually booked and controlled by generalist event producers. Conducting additional analyses specifying each of the other kinds of venues as a separate binary variable resulted into unchanged significant patterns.

Analysis
To test whether the value creation ability of generalists was different than that of specialists, a one-way ANOVA compared the means of the dependent variables (value creation and value appropriation) between generalists and specialists. Moreover, to check the robustness of the findings, linear regression analyses (Models 1A-3A) were used for value creation and, due to the count nature of the dependent variable, Poisson regression analyses (Models 1B-3B) were used to value appropriation. First, regressions were run with just the control variables, and then adding the predictor (Models 1 and 2 respectively). In order to check the validity of the proposed effects, further testing controlled separately for maximum price and price standard deviation as possible confounding measures of minimum price (i.e. value creation) and number of price categories (i.e. value appropriation) respectively (Model 3).

Discussion
The results indicate that live music events produced by generalists showed evidence of greater value creation and appropriation, even when controlling for concert characteristics such as day of the week, nationality of the act, venue, whether the concert was a single performance or part of a tour, and whether the act was an individual performer or a band. Further controlling for potential alternative mechanisms, such as maximum price tag and price standard deviation, the effect of generalism on the value creation and appropriation indicators -minimum price tag and number of price categoriesremained significant, supporting the hypotheses.
The theoretical synergy between resource-based view and population ecology proposed in this study and applied to the context of live music can foreseeably act as a springboard for future media business research focussed on value creation and appropriation through a niche-width lens. Interestingly, and in opposition to past research that found specialists to hold an advantage in industries where identity consumption prevails (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000), the current study contributes to the extant literature by showing that resource-partitioning models are contingent on industry-and organisationlevel characteristics, such as the ability to spread fixed costs and to minimise transaction costs. Thus, even in some markets -such as live music -where status and identity are cardinal concepts, generalists can enjoy a competitive advantage over specialists. This has relevant implications for media business research, as mentioned below.
Another important contribution of the current research is to apply the resource-based view to media business. This research extends previous work on the importance of managing transaction costs to increase value creation and appropriation (Foss & Foss, 2005) to the media industries, specifically to the live music industry. This study builds upon and goes beyond existing theoretical frameworks utilised to study live music (Courty & Pagliero, 2014;Holt, 2010) by analysing how the economic characteristics of and the management of transaction costs in live music events impact value creation and value appropriation. Building on the economic features of the live music industry, such as the pairing of high fixed costs and the superstar effect (Connolly & Krueger, 2006), the results evidence the ability of mainstream artists and producers to create and appropriate more value by leveraging on their status and on wide audiences. Interestingly, the current findings can be extended to other media-related industries where the same features exist -i.e. contexts characterised by the pairing of superstar dynamics and high fixed costs -a combination that engenders an advantage for generalists -as well as by a reliance on status to reduce the uncertainty of consumption value among final users. Examples of media industries with these characteristics include not only television (Chan-Olmsted & Guo, 2011;Gimpel, 2015;Moe, 2012), but also home video (Elberse & Oberholzer-Gee, 2006), performance content creation (Pitt, 2010), and museums (Frey, 1998). Another possible example in this regard is the (print) publishing industry (Cook & Sirkkunen, 2013), which is characterised by substantrial fixed costs (McGuigan & Russell, 2008) and heavy reliance on legitimacy (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).
Finally, this study contributes to a more high-construal discourse in media management research. Media business has been radically transformed by the digital revolution in the last two decades (Kaplan, 2015;Perez, 2016). The effects of this revolution on the music industry have been substantial and have put live music in the spotlight (Moreau, 2013;Tschmuck, 2012), making it ever more important for producers and artists to capitalise on the value created with live events. For this reason, assessing the drivers of value creation in live music is ever more important. In addition to this, media research has acknowledged the unique positioning of media industries, which are driven by a combination of cultural, business, and social logics (Altmeppen et al., 2017;Eikhof & Haunschild, 2007). Thus, the creation and appropriation of value in media -including live music -is a multi-layered question due to the multi-faceted nature of value in such contexts. Namely, economics, social, and cultural components converge into notions of value in media industries (Bolin, 2016;Bourdieu, 1993). As the current research has mostly focussed on the economic component of value, it would be interesting to extend the current framework by accounting for other dimensions of value. For instance, are specialists creating social or cultural value that generalists are unable to produce (cf., Whiting, 2021)? By considering logics that are not just economic, the answer to these questions might further inform on the impact of niche width on value creation, and potentially on the necessity to economically support specialist live music event producers, especially during moments of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic (Davies, 2021).

Practical Implications
These findings have important implications for practice: By highlighting the factors that allow generalists to occupy an advantageous position in the live music industry, this study offers insight to both generalists and specialists on possible improvements of managerial practices aimed at enhancing value creation. Generalists should leverage on their competitive advantage to increase their ability to create and appropriate value not only by diversifying the revenue streams, managing fixed costs, and reinforcing their relationship with superstar performers, but also by making the sale of ticket prices more dynamic, so as to catch as much utility surplus as possible. Specialist event producers, on the other hand, need to limit their disadvantage by replicating the behaviour of generalists whenever possible. Some strategies aimed at doing so include the recruitment of popular emerging artists that are not yet orbiting in the generalist market space -e.g. performers who become popular by sharing their content online (Cayari, 2011) -but also the diversification of revenue streams by attempting to manage ancillary goods in addition to ticket sales and the formation of specialist alliances to boost the ability to fight the secondary market and generalist competitors. Specialists should also make efforts to improve their pricing strategies, for instance, increasing the price categories on sale whenever possible, so as to enhance their value appropriation ability.

Limitations and future research
Notwithstanding its contribution in exploring new avenues of research by synthetising organisational theories -the resource-based view and organisational ecology -and applying them to the context of the live music industry, the current study is not exempt from limitations. The first limitation of this study is that no data were collected to measure transaction cost management directly. While there is a strong theoretical basis to argue that managing transaction costs is one source of value creation, the current empirical test was that of a main effect of generalism on value creation. Future empirical research could directly measure transaction costs management and its interaction with generalism to affect value creation, so as to provide an empirical test of the interaction of those two components. For instance, specialists' increased ability to manage transaction costs -for instance, by increasing the status of their performers and thus reducing consumers' uncertainty -should reduce their gap with generalists in terms of value creation and appropriation.
A second limitation of this study is that data about the niche width of music events producers has been collected based on the mainstream success of performing acts, due to the unavailability of direct data collection from producers and content creators. Theoretical and empirical arguments support the usage of performing acts' success as a proxy for producers' generalism by showing that generalist event producers tend to organise events featuring mainstream artists while specialists focus more on niche performers. Nonetheless, future studies could further contribute to the literature by directly measuring niche width at the producer level, collecting data from event producers.
On a related note, the measures of value creation and appropriation that I employed are context-specific. Even if the minimum ticket price is an accurate proxy of value creation, as it indicates the value that promoters and artists expect the whole audience of potential consumers to be ready to pay, future studies might develop and test more generalisable measures of value creation. In a similar fashion, the number of price categories of tickets on sale for each live music event effectively tests the ability of producers to appropriate value from different segments of their audience; yet, the measure is domain-specific and might not be easily generalisable. Moreover, the number of price categories might be considered as just a mechanism that event organisers use to appropriate value. Whereas I explained the proximity between price categories as a measure and value appropriation as a construct, I acknowledge that the number of price categories is an imperfect proxy. I wish for future research that will be able to assess value appropriation more directly in live music. Nonetheless, the soundness of minimum price tag and number of price categories as proxies for value creation and appropriation in the context of live music events is supported theoretically by the arguments described above and empirically by the significance of the results of this study, even controlling for potentially competing mechanisms such as price maximum and price standard deviation. Yet, when extending the current theoretical framework to different industries and contexts, the development of more generalisable measures to assess the ability of organisation to create value would constitute a meaningful contribution to the literature.
A final drawback of the current research is that, due to computational limitations, the data collected are limited in time, as they feature all the available concerts on sale on the Ticketone.it website in the span of five weeks, and they are not dynamic. While the prices that regulate transactions in primary markets tend to be stable, the ability of future research to collect data dynamically, particularly by incorporating dynamic data about sales on secondary market platforms, would definitely shed additional light on the phenomenon under study. It would further our understanding of value creation in the live music industry by better understanding secondary market pricing dynamics, possibly generating insight useful to quantify the surplus that event producers are leaving on the table -or rather in the pockets of scalpers.
In addition to the possible refinements of the measures used in this study, I call for future research to extend the current findings both theoretically and phenomenologically. Theoretical extensions could investigate mechanisms that drive the effect of generalism on value creation and appropriation, as well as identify moderating factors that might amplify or weaken this relationship. For instance, when specialists organise concerts with niche artists who have a strong fanbase and enjoy a high reputation among a sizeable niche of the consumers, it is possible that their disadvantage in value creation and appropriation might be reduced. On the other hand, some mainstream artists -such as Bruce Springsteen (Krueger, 2005) -might focus on creating goodwill for their fans and voluntarily minimise value creation and appropriation. Finally, as mentioned above, I underline the desirability of research testing the relationship between niche width and value creation and appropriation in other media industries.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Federico Magni is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zürich. His research interests revolve around creativity, artificial intelligence in organizations, diversity, and the intersection between arts and management.