Breaking profitable dominant designs to realign value management with society expectations: insights from two disruptive cases within hit factories of the Music Industry

The renew of an artist is consider as the main challenge in the Music Industry to maintain the contemporary aspect of its titles. Some artists established through profitable hit factories seems to be able to break them if their titles are no more aligned with society expectations. This alignment between the society expectations and products is a core challenge for all mass-market such as Music. In music industry, very few is known about value management processes that allow this alignment, except the fact that they are mainly based on institutionalization rather than development of an engineering. Building on two case studies of change in artistic positioning: Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On? and 13'Organisé, we offer an insight of value management processes in the creation of new titles in the hit factories that are Motown Record and the French Hip-Hop. Our results highlight the impact of value management in both collective definition of value and NPD processes within the Music Industry. These case studies provide interesting examples of the ability of both artists and social structures in Music to maintain a systematic alignment to society expectations by interacting with the design parameters of their products.